Tag: Events

  • Is DEI Dead or Changing?

    Is DEI Dead or Changing?

    Under repeated threats to their funding, higher ed institutions began to rebrand or shut down cultural centers, Black student resource centers and LGBTQ+ and women’s programs. Many campus diversity officers lost their jobs or were shuffled off to other offices, barred from doing much of the work they were hired for. Some institutions scrapped celebrated traditions such as affinity graduations and campus residential communities geared toward students of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds. Some student groups, like Esperanza, lost university funding because of their identity-based missions.

    In one recent example, the University of Alabama ended two student publications, one focused on women and the other on Black students, citing federal policy concerns. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga shuttered its Women’s and Gender Equity Center, an LGBTQ center, its Office of Multicultural Affairs, and the Office of Student & Family Engagement, replacing them with a Center for Student Leadership, Engagement and Community. The changes have affected faculty and staff as well as students; earlier this fall, the University of Illinois System banned consideration of race, sex or country of origin not only in financial aid decisions but in hiring, tenure and promotion as well.

    “It’s very sad to see a lot of universities fall to their knees,” Luna said. Higher ed institutions “are supposed to be the places where the exchange of ideas happen, where leaders are developed and where you’re just taught about how the world objectively is … It’s a very dangerous sign for the future.”

    A Double Attack

    State-level anti-DEI laws have proliferated for several years now, but diversity-related programs and services were dealt a double blow this year when Trump took office.

    On Feb. 14, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter declaring race-conscious student programming and resources illegal, based on an expansive interpretation of the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision against considering race in admissions in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard. It gave colleges and universities 14 days to eliminate such offerings or risk losing their federal funding. A month later, ED launched investigations into 51 colleges for ongoing DEI activity. Federal judges struck down the department’s anti-DEI guidance in April, pausing enforcement, but colleges nonetheless scrambled to review and scrub DEI language from their programs and offices or shutter them altogether.

    Over the summer, the Department of Justice came out with a sweeping guidance memo declaring an even wider set of practices off-limits, including those that use “potentially unlawful proxies” for race, such as recruiting students from majority-minority geographic areas. In a series of contentious legal battles, the federal government pressured some universities to agree to settlements that included anti-DEI provisions, including bans on race-conscious programs and transgender athletes. For example, the University of Virginia, which the DOJ targeted for DEI practices, recently agreed to quash all DEI programming to maintain federal funding.

    I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.”

    Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at USC’s Race and Equity Center

    All the while, federal agencies have slashed, frozen and stalled billions of dollars in research grants to universities, often for perceived ties to DEI concepts. More than 120 TRIO programs, which support disadvantaged students, also lost their federal funds over alleged DEI connections. And in September, the Education Department abruptly ended grants for many minority-serving institutions, calling such programs—used to fund supports like extra peer mentoring or streamlined STEM programming at colleges with burgeoning minority student populations—“discriminatory” and “unconstitutional.”

    States, meanwhile, enacted an unprecedented number of new laws cracking down on DEI: 14 in 12 states, including Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Mississippi, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming. That’s double the number of states that passed anti-DEI laws last year.

    A higher education consultant and lawyer in the Washington D.C. area, who asked to remain anonymous, said campus leaders are increasingly asking, “How do we keep ourselves off the radar? How do we avoid scrutiny from the federal government?” At the same time, they face “increasingly disgruntled and disappointed communities within who are saying, ‘We thought you cared about this issue’,” the source said. University leaders have come under “very real pressure.”

    A ‘Loss of Momentum’

    Diversity officers and scholars fear that this year’s seismic policy shifts and campus crackdowns on DEI will have ripple effects across academe and beyond.

    Kaleb L. Briscoe, associate professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Oklahoma, is concerned that some institutions have responded to DEI bans by limiting what’s taught in the classroom.

    For example, Florida colleges removed hundreds of courses related to race, sex and gender from their general education requirement options. Classes at Texas A&M University that “advocate race or gender ideology, sexual orientation, or gender identity” now require approval from the university president. And other Texas universities have undertaken reviews of course syllabi and curricula for anything that runs afoul of state or federal DEI bans.

    Curriculum changes that would normally “take years’ worth of processes” are sometimes happening quickly and without appropriate faculty input, Briscoe said. While proponents of DEI bans often call for viewpoint diversity, “by implementing these bans, you are taking away voices and taking away knowledge … which really counters what they are hoping to do.”

    She also fears a “blue, red, purple divide of education,” where students have different levels of access to certain subject areas or perspectives depending on where they go to college.

    “We are now going to see different people in different states learning and getting access to different things,” she said. “That is horrible because, knowledge-wise, we should be preparing our students to be productive citizens across difference.”

    What we’re doing is reducing opportunities.”

    Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education

    Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, said he’s mourning a “loss of momentum” in improving the experiences and outcomes of underrepresented students, a movement that stretches back to the 1960s.

    He recently visited a campus where “the Black cultural center still exists in name, but it has no staff. It has no programming. It’s just an empty room,” he said. Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy, said he found a smattering of students still trying to use the space, sitting in the dark and talking. He remembers when the same center was “a light, bright, vibrant space that was rich with culture that had employees … who helped to make it a home away from home.”

    To him, the darkened space was a symbol of what’s been lost.

    DEI Professionals Under Fire

    Harper said he’s been especially disheartened to see DEI professionals lose their jobs.

    Institutions dismissed “good, innocent, hard-working people who were expert at bringing campus communities together across racial, religious, ideological and other important divides,” and who pushed for some widely-cared-about issues like pay equity for women and access for students with disabilities, he said. “The loss of those people has been catastrophic to higher education, to the students that they were serving and to those people’s careers.”

    A former diversity professional at a public higher ed institution in the South told Inside Higher Ed that DEI officers were wrestling with the “trauma,” “shame” and “humiliation” of suffering such a forceful, nationwide rejection.

    The ex-diversity officer, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of career repercussions, spent years working to make their institution a more welcoming place for students of color—and it worked, they said. Over their tenure, faculty diversity increased and the percentage of underrepresented students in the university’s entering class more than doubled.

    But you wouldn’t know it from looking at the institution’s website, the former diversity officer said. It makes no mention of the diversity office, which was dissolved. The university stripped any evidence of its work, including videos of events and educational programs, data reports and online community platforms. Unlike many of their co-workers, the former diversity officer retained an unrelated position at the institution, but their former role feels like a “scarlet letter” on campus and in the job market, they said.

    They worry not only for their colleagues but also for students and faculty members left unserved.

    “I can tell you that students of color who had community, don’t,” they said. “They’re spitting on Black kids, they’re calling them the N-word, and kids don’t know where to go. They don’t know what office is going to support them.”

    The former diversity professional believes DEI is officially “dead,” at least as a label.

    But “the underlying work of creating welcoming, diverse, inclusive, supportive cultures on campus and communities is not dead,” they said. The “benefits of diversity, of inclusion, those are still there. It just can’t be called that.”

    Students in Ann Arbor protested the University of Michigan’s decision last spring to close its DEI offices, putting up posters criticizing President Donald Trump and former UM President Santa Ono.

    Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

    DEI’s Murky Future

    Harper argued that the work can’t really go on without using the term “DEI.” He believes replacement terms like “culture” and ”community” lack specificity in a way that makes them meaningless.

    “It’s giving weak sauce,” he said. “I am a person who still believes, and I will forever believe, that it is important to call it diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism.” The same goes for “antisemitism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. It’s important to call those things by their names.”

    Whether DEI will continue in some form is an open question currently under debate by current and former DEI officers and researchers. Some retain their optimism; others argue it’s going to take years, even decades, for campus infrastructure to recover from the full extent of this year’s losses—if a comeback is even possible.

    The DEI rollbacks mark a retreat from “60-plus years of effort to broaden access and address inequities,” said Paulette Granberry Russell, who’s stepping down as president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education in January after five years at the helm. “So, do I see this work coming back? Bouncing back? No.”

    Regardless of who wins the next election, she believes federal funding cuts and stymied DEI-related research will cause long-lasting damage. She’s spoken with scholars studying issues related to race and gender who have been doxed and threatened, and who fear continuing the work they’ve done for years.

    “What we’re doing is reducing opportunities,” Granberry Russell said. “You’re not going to make that up in two, three, four years.”

    But she’s not without hope. She emphasized that a “systems approach” to improving academic outcomes for students—making such work the entire university’s responsibility—could be the next phase of these efforts as diversity offices fade. Doing so would require leaders to express “their commitment, which at least at this point, requires a certain amount of courage, given the very heavy-handed … taking away of resources to bring colleges and universities into line,” she said.

    A chief diversity officer who lost their job in a state with a DEI ban but now works in the same role at an east coast institution, said they’re doing a “post-mortem” on where DEI went wrong. They believe the DEI movement might have tried to accomplish too much too fast, without explaining the research behind the practices developed to boost student outcomes.

    Practitioners introduced concepts “really new to people” and sometimes “began to cancel people quickly” who didn’t get it, said the CDO, who asked to remain anonymous. But “you can’t run a marathon with people who are not fit. You have to bring them up to where you want them to be. And that requires teaching. It requires patience.”

    They noted that the field of DEI grew rapidly in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Scholarship on improving campus climate flourished, and diversity professionals enjoyed a wide berth to try new strategies to close equity gaps. But it was short-lived. Less than a year into the CDO’s role at their previous institution, the anti-DEI movement gained traction in the state. An anti-DEI law ultimately passed, and the diversity office later closed for good.

    “That great rebirth or Renaissance” was “like a star that just had its last final flash of wonder—and then the death began,” they said. “We didn’t know at the time that the star was shining brightly to die.”

    They believe DEI could be on the brink of a new era, one that rectifies some of its past mistakes and garners more support. “My fear is that we won’t be given the opportunity to do so,” they said. But they’re confident diversity professionals won’t give up on the programs, practices and strategies they believe students need.

    “Fear not. Rest up, my friends,” they said. “We will be back.”

    The D.C.-based higher education consultant and lawyer believes DEI isn’t dead; it’s just shifting. Campus DEI work has never been unlawful, they argued, so colleges and universities simply need to emphasize that fact, not scale back their work. They encourage campus leaders to state explicitly that cultural centers and programs are open to all, and to train everyone on campus, including student group leaders, how to frame their programming that way—even though the programs didn’t discriminate in the first place.

    “Many times, I’m just trying to remove language that I know is going to draw scrutiny and then trying to offer them a way to continue to live out their values,” they said. “There may be ways to thematically describe the intended purpose of a program without using an identity marker that really just is a lightning rod in this moment.”

    They acknowledged that “this transition has been really painful” for all invested in diversity, equity and inclusion work.

    “But I think people are resilient,” they said. “They’re evolving, and they’re trying to figure out a pathway to make the work of universal access and opportunity evergreen.”

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  • Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    Hope Is Essential to Success of Any Job Search (opinion)

    We live in uncertain and unstable times. The job market is contracting due to economic uncertainty, political instability and the increase of AI-driven automation. In my role as a career adviser, I talk to many students and recent graduates who have faced a long and difficult job search. The words and phrases I hear most often in these conversations are “dejected,” “soul-crushing,” or “I feel like I am screaming into the void.” International students face an added challenge, with H-1B visas seeming out of reach as they become more difficult and expensive for employers to process.

    All of this uncertainty can lead to feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. What I hear from students, and in particular our international community at Columbia University, is, “What is the point of applying to jobs if no one will hire me?” Such self-defeating thoughts can lead to inaction and feelings of despair. Yet hope is essential to the success of any job search. Having hope or optimism that something will work out is central to achieving one’s goals.

    It is likewise essential that a career coach or adviser have a hopeful, positive attitude. A recent article published by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics describes how when people who were unemployed for a long period of time worked with caseworkers who had “strong confidence in the potential of their clients to find employment,” the relationship led to an increase in the client’s motivation and resilience, and to improved earnings and employment outcomes over time. Thus, our outlook as advisers can impact the students we are working with, so we must manage our own feelings of hopelessness. I find myself returning to Jane Goodall’s The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times for inspiration.

    Another source of inspiration I return to is a framework called Career Flow: A Hope-Centered Approach to Career Development, developed in 2011 by Spencer G. Niles, Norman E. Amundson and Roberta A. Neault. In the remainder of this article, I plan to provide career development professionals with an overview of this hope-based career development model and suggestions on how they can implement it to assist their students and graduates.

    In the theory, “Career Flow” is an analogy that compares different types of experiences in one’s career to the flow of water. Anyone who has felt “underwater” at work can understand this metaphor. Finding “optimal” flow in a professional setting means that your skills and personality match the tasks and requirements of your role. Below, I outline suggested steps based on the model to help you implement a hope-based approach to career advising.

    Step 1: Assessing and Establishing Hope

    Start by letting the advisee tell their story and share the challenges that they face. Listen and reflect back what you are hearing. But also start to consider the person’s outlook and demeanor. Many of the people I talk to, including federal workers who were laid off or furloughed, exhibit signs of hope even though they understand the current challenges they are facing and express frustration and sometimes fear. I have been surprised and impressed by people’s resilience and willingness to pivot, which I make sure to point out. That helps them see the strength they are exhibiting even in a moment of crisis.

    However, some people will present as mostly frustrated, with little hope. If you are talking to someone who seems particularly hopeless about their situation, it could be helpful to reflect that back to them. You might say, “What you just described to me seems like a very tough situation. I wonder if you might feel a sense of hopelessness?” Sometimes it just takes awareness for someone to realize that they need to shift their mindset. Validate their struggle, then help them reframe their point of view toward one that is more hopeful. For example, you could mention the Career Flow model that shows the positive benefits of having hope in a career search. If a student seems unwilling to shift, you might want to suggest that they seek extra support through family, friends or counseling services.

    Step 2: Self-Reflection and Self-Clarity

    Self-reflection and self-clarity are essential to any job search, including when it comes to establishing a hopeful approach. If someone is not clear about their own needs and values or has a lack of understanding of their situation and challenges, that person can struggle to succeed in their goals. Therefore, help them gain a greater sense of self-clarity by reflecting any key interests, skills and values you hear them describe in your conversation. At the same time, it is important to ask about possible challenges or obstacles to fully understand their situation and address hurdles standing in the way of their goals.

    If a student seems hopeless about succeeding in their goals, advisers can bolster hope by asking about areas of strength or asking them to describe a time they felt they succeeded when faced with a difficult task. Reminding students of past successes and helping to celebrate these wins can increase their sense of agency and help them believe they can overcome future challenges.

    Step 3: Visioning

    An inherently hopeful exercise, visioning is the ability to brainstorm future possibilities and identify desired outcomes. Sometimes, I talk to a student who is so focused on one goal, such as finding an academic job or postdoc position, that they forget to consider other opportunities where they can apply their skills and expertise. When starting the visioning process, encourage advises to imagine multiple ways of reaching their desired goal. This is also known as “pathways thinking” and, in the Career Flow model, quantity is more important than quality. When an extensive list of possible career paths is identified, the advisee should use self-reflection and self-clarity to narrow their options by selecting a few paths that best align with their interests, skills and values. Pathways thinking also supports advisees in being both flexible and adaptable, traits that are incredibly important in any job search.

    However, people who feel hopeless can sometimes lack the capability to consider other options. Help connect them to resources, such as career assessments like ImaginePhD, myIDP or O*Net, where they can gather information to explore different types of employment. Also, help them consider ways they can gain skills or experience through online courses, volunteering, on-campus work or internships.

    Step 4: Goal Setting and Planning

    Once a student has selected a few possible paths, then focus on setting specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) goals. Students often set lofty or poorly defined goals such as, “I want to find a job.” Help them identify small, realistic steps they can take to achieve their main goal of employment. For example, suggest that they find a job they want to apply to and create a tailored résumé and cover letter for the role and then schedule another career advising session in two weeks to review the documents. Again, consider possible barriers to their goals and how they can overcome them.

    Step 5: Implementing and Adapting

    As students start to reach their incremental goals they will encounter either positive feedback (e.g. a request for an interview) or a lack of success (silence or rejection emails). As they gather more data, help them revise or relinquish possible paths that are no longer relevant or serving them. Sometimes, you will need to help them accept the fact that a goal might not be achieved. This process is known as radical acceptance, or giving in to your current reality. Help them see that finding employment during a period of uncertainty is difficult and can cause pain, but life can still be hopeful and joyful.

    Another approach is to help students see what they have control over. We might not be able to control the economy, but we can control our actions and our outlook, and we can seek out help when we need it or find support in community with others. Overall, be there as a source of support, guidance and encouragement.

    In conclusion, it can take substantial effort to choose to be hopeful in periods of uncertainty, but we must maintain hope even in the darkest of times. To quote C. R. Snyder, who writes about the psychology of hope, “in studying hope …, I observed the spectrum of human strength. This reminds me of the rainbow that frequently is used as a symbol of hope. A rainbow is a prism that sends shards of multicolored light in various directions. It lifts our spirits and makes us think of what is possible. Hope is the same—a personal rainbow of the mind.”

    So, let us be a rainbow for those we work with and help them to let hope, rather than despair, lead the way.

    Francesca Fanelli has 10 years of experience working with graduate-level students and is a licensed mental health counselor in the state of New York. She currently serves as senior associate director of graduate career development at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where she specializes in career advising and event management.

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  • MacKenzie Scott Showers Colleges With More Gifts

    MacKenzie Scott Showers Colleges With More Gifts

    Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott gave more multimillion donations out to colleges.

    picture alliance/Getty Images

    Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott is at it again with another round of gifts.

    Robeson Community College in North Carolina announced a $24 million gift from Scott on Thursday, the single largest contribution in the rural college’s history.

    Robeson’s president, Melissa Singler, called the gift “a profound affirmation of our students, our faculty and staff, and the limitless potential of Robeson County.”

    “Never before have we been given a gift of this magnitude that affords our team the time, space and freedom to think, dream and plan boldly,” Singler said in a news release.

    Scott also gifted Carl Albert State College in Oklahoma $23 million. The college is working on a strategic plan for how to use the funds, focused on “sustainability, academic and career success, innovation, and community engagement,” according to an announcement last week. Connors State College, also in Oklahoma, celebrated a $15 million contribution from Scott, its largest gift ever.

    Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College also announced a “multi-million dollar gift” last week, the largest unrestricted gift in its history, but didn’t specify the amount. The tribal college plans to use Scott’s funding to support scholarships and grants for native and non-native students.

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  • Grad Programs Brace for Loan Caps

    Grad Programs Brace for Loan Caps

    Most of the colleges with the largest graduate programs in the country don’t have clear plans for how they’ll deal with new loan caps, set to kick in next July. And if they do, they aren’t taking publicly about it.

    For years, students could borrow essentially unlimited funds to pay for graduate education, thanks to a program known as Grad PLUS that capped loans at the cost of attendance. Republicans in Congress and other critics have argued that colleges took advantage of this program and raised their prices, fueling the student debt crisis. Loans for grad students make up nearly half of the federal loan portfolio.

    Along the way, colleges have begun to rely on graduate education to fund their university operations, higher ed experts say.

    But now that two-decade-old system is ending. Congress eliminated Grad PLUS over the summer and will cap how much students can borrow for graduate education. Lawmakers also limited Parent PLUS loans, which were also previously uncapped and offered families a way to make up the gap and pay for college. Both changes came out of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

    Beginning next summer, most graduate programs will have a federal loan cap of $100,000, with exceptions for a scaled-down number of professional programs with a limit set at $200,000. Those changes have created uncertainty for graduate schools and students who are navigating a changing landscape with fewer resources. Experts say graduate schools could face enrollment declines and some could shutter, thanks to the new limits.

    Even before the loan caps, graduate education was facing a reckoning, particularly after the Trump administration clamped down on federal research funding. Colleges paused graduate admissions for doctoral programs, and sometimes rescinded offers. Meanwhile, colleges are starting to rethink their approaches to humanities doctoral programs, among other shifts in this space.

    Planning for Change

    To better understand how universities are planning ahead, Inside Higher Ed reached out to 20 of the largest graduate programs in the nation. Most did not respond. Those that did emphasized a mix of increased corporate engagement and expanded loan options, among other measures.

    But for the most part, many appear to still be figuring it out.

    “We’re spending a lot of time this year looking at diversifying the streams of funding for graduate students,” said Bonnie Ferri, vice provost for graduate and postdoctoral education at Georgia Institute of Technology.

    Ferri noted that while Georgia Tech already has corporate partnerships that sponsor projects, which in turn help fund students, the university is doubling down on those efforts this year and “focusing on being more systematic” to spread those dollars across more graduate programs.

    At a recent University of Florida Board of Trustees meeting, Vice President and Chief Enrollment Strategist, Mary Parker, said UF will “have to figure out how to fill the gap for our students” as loan options diminish. She noted UF is rolling out Scholarship Universe, a tool to help students find internal and external scholarships. Parker said UF is also “looking at the expansion of our institution loan program” and the university will also help students identify private loan options.

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign spokesperson Patrick Wade told Inside Higher Ed by email that Illinois is still in the planning process and it is too early to share specific details. But Wade added that university officials “are directing units to begin developing contingency plans and to communicate proactively with current and prospective students, particularly in professionally oriented programs, where we expect recent changes to have the greatest impact.”

    Several other institutions said it was too early to share details about how they’ll fill loan gaps.

    Grad Enrollment Fallout

    Some experts believe the changes to federal loans will leave students scrambling.

    “I think when we get to July 1 next year, when these caps are scheduled to go into place, there will be a lot of students who are going to need to come up with another way of paying for graduate school than what’s been true in the past,” Jordan Matsudaira, director of the Postsecondary Education & Economics Research at American University, told Inside Higher Ed.

    Research led by Matsudaira projects that programs such as dentistry, osteopathy and medicine will be particularly squeezed by the changes.

    And given the many other pressures on university budgets, such as federal research funding challenges, federal efforts to limit international enrollment, and the looming demographic cliff, Matsudaira doesn’t expect universities to lower graduate tuition or significantly increase aid.

    “I just think institution budgets are going to be under so much pressure from so many different things that it is just incredibly optimistic thinking, bordering on fantasy, to believe that they’re going to come up with substantial sources of funding to be able to either cut their graduate school prices or be able to fund their own loan program to enroll students,” he said.

    (Some experts have suggested that states should get involved by providing low or no-interest loans as the Grad Plus loan option goes away.)

    Matsudaira expects a “very rough transition period over this coming year” for students. He also expects graduate enrollment to decline.

    “The question is how much does it reduce the number of students pursuing graduate school,” Matsudaira said.

    Private loans are one option students are likely to turn to. He believes private loans will surge, with the market growing from around $3 billion a year currently to $10 billion in the near future.

    But even private loans may prove difficult to obtain for some students.

    “If I had to make predictions, I would guess that private student loan providers will make loans available to students attending programs with a good track record of earnings and loan repayment, but it is less certain whether students in programs that tend to lead to lower earnings and/or worse loan repayment outcomes will be able to access private student loans,” Lesley Turner, an associate professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, wrote by email.

    She added private loans will have “fewer protections and less flexibility in repayment terms.”

    Turner expects that the fallout of the changes to graduate school funding will not only decrease enrollment but may even prod some institutions to shutter such programs as headcount falls.

    Credit rating agencies have also taken a dim view of what the changes will mean.

    “Institutions with a greater proportion of graduate students will likely face more pronounced impacts from these policy changes, particularly if they serve disproportionately high levels of aid- and loan-dependent students,” Fitch Ratings concluded in its 2026 sector outlook, which it described as deteriorating. “While private loan providers can fill gaps created by federal limits, private offerings may nevertheless deter students, as private loans will likely be offered with less favorable rates and limited flexibility compared to what was available under federal programs.”

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  • Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Brown University Reels After Deadly Shooting

    Two students were killed and nine were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University on Saturday. The university’s president Christina H. Paxson described the incident as “a tragedy that no university community is ever ready for.”

    “The past 24 hours really have been unimaginable,” she said in a letter to the Ivy League university’s greater community Sunday morning, adding that most of the injured students remain hospitalized in stable condition.

    The shooting began just after 4 p.m. at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building. The Providence, Rhode Island, campus was locked down until Sunday morning when local law enforcement officials ended the order, sharing that they had identified and detained a male in his 20s as a person of interest. That person was later released. State police and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation remain on campus.

    Brown University President Christina Paxson leaving a press conference Sunday.

    Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    According to The Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, many of the students affected were in a review session for a Principles of Economics exam. One freshman, Spencer Yang, told The Herald that he was shot in the leg but others near him were “seriously injured.” He said he tried to help them and keep them conscious.

    “While we always prepare for major crises, we also pray such a day never comes,” Paxson said in her letter. “We know there is a long road ahead as students and families deal with the after effects of the events of the past day and the emergency that is still unfolding.”

    Joseph Oduro, a senior from New Jersey and teaching assistant for the economics class, told The Boston Globe that the review session had just wrapped up when the shooter entered carrying “the longest gun I’ve ever seen in my life.” Oduro crouched behind the podium at the front of the auditorium and huddled with a first-year student who had been shot twice in the leg. He stayed with her until she reached the hospital, The Globe reported.

    Oduro didn’t want to describe what he saw as first responders evacuated the classroom, but said it hurt to see his students “all in a state of panic and desperate pain.”

    University Provost Francis J. Doyle III announced Sunday morning, that “out of profound concern for all students, faculty and staff,” all undergraduate, graduate and medical classes, exams and final projects for the semester would not take place as scheduled. Students are free to leave campus if they are able, but if not, access to on-campus services will remain available, Doyle said. More guidance about the status of unfinished courses will be released in the days ahead, he added.

    Saturday’s events sparked anger and frustration among gun control advocates and affected students as the number of mass school shootings on record continues to climb. One student, Zoe Weissman, a college sophomore, survived the Brown shooting Saturday nearly eight years after she had been affected by a similar event in her hometown—Parkland, Florida.

    Weissman, now 20, was a student at Parkland Middle School when 17 people were killed and 18 injured at the nearby Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

    “Mentally, I feel like I’m 12 again. This just feels exactly how I felt in 2018. But honestly, I’m really angry,” Weissman said in an interview with MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. “This isn’t a new phenomenon, and we’re going to get to a point where there’s [more] people like myself who survived two of these.”

    Another Brown student, Mia Tretta, was shot in a 2019 school shooting in Santa Clarita that left two people dead, the New York Times reported.

    “People always think, well, it’ll never be me,” Tretta told the Times. “And until I was shot in my school, I also thought the same thing.”

    President Donald Trump addressed the shooting during a holiday reception at the White House Sunday, but did not speak directly to public concerns about gun control or the number of incidents on college or K-12 campuses.

    “Things can happen,” he said. “So to the nine injured, get well fast and the families of those two who are no longer with us, I pay my deepest regards and respects.”

    The campus shooting also gained attention from fans of the reality TV show Survivor. Season 48 runner-up, Eva Erickson, is a Brown doctoral candidate, and she shared on social media how she had left the engineering building minutes before the shooting began.

    “I am so, so extremely lucky that I was very unproductive at work today,” she said in a video eight hours after the lockdown began. “I was in my office in Barus and Holley in that area until 4 p.m. and I was like, man I’m just not getting nothing done on my code and randomly decided I would go to the gym … I left and about 20 minutes later, we get the warning.”

    Erickson added that while she appreciated all the thoughts and prayers she had received, it wasn’t enough.

    “We need more than thoughts and prayers,” she said. “This is ridiculous that as college students in America we have to worry about someone shooting up our classrooms.”



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  • Friday Fragments

    Friday Fragments

    Friday Fragments

    Sara Brady

    Fri, 12/12/2025 – 03:00 AM

    Sans-serif fonts, passing along great literature, Middle States.

    Byline(s)
    Matt Reed

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  • Policy Impact Undervalued by Universities

    Policy Impact Undervalued by Universities

    Barely a third of social scientists believe their university would promote them based on the strength of their research impact, a global poll of researchers has found.

    Asked whether their institution would promote or give tenure to a scholar for their efforts to apply research outside academia, only 37 percent of 1,805 social scientists surveyed by Sage agreed.

    Only 28 percent of respondents said their efforts to make a difference outside academia would lead to additional research funding from their institution, while just 35 percent said their university offered awards or prizes to recognize impact.

    Thirty percent of the survey’s respondents, who came from 92 countries, say they receive no recognition at all for this work.

    Instead, the survey by the U.S.-based social sciences publisher suggested institutions tend to value and reward publication in highly cited journals more than academics. Asked whether the ultimate goal of research is to make a positive impact on society, 92 percent agreed this is the case for themselves, but only 68 percent believe it’s true for institutions.

    “I don’t care about impacting my colleagues and being cited—I want to impact practice in the field,” explained one U.S.-based respondent, who added there is “no good way to know if this happens.”

    “All the other metrics (like rejection rates, Google scores) are internal to the discipline and don’t really measure anything useful,” the researcher continued, according to the Sage report, titled “Do Social Scientists Care If They Make Societal Impact?” and published Tuesday.

    Similarly, 91 percent of researchers agree the ultimate goal of research is to build on the literature and enable future research, but only 71 percent think the leaders at their institution agree with this.

    That perceived misalignment between the motivation of social scientists and institutions should prompt a rethink on whether prestige metrics used in academia are misaligned with values, argues the Sage report.

    It notes that researchers value peer regard more than citation metrics, yet they perceive that administrators prioritize impact factors, creating tension in tenure and promotion decisions.

    “At times, this means we have to challenge the status quo of what matters in higher education—for example, by moving beyond an overemphasis on scholarly impact measures [and] toward recognizing research that benefits people through policy, practice and public life,” said Ziyad Marar, president of global publishing at Sage.

    “It’s important that we listen closely to researchers themselves as we do this work—understanding what motivates them, where they focus their efforts and what barriers stand in their way. This report does exactly that,” he added.

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  • Harvard Health and Human Rights Director Stepping Down

    Harvard Health and Human Rights Director Stepping Down

    Officials also announced that the center will hone its primary focus to children’s health.

    John Tlumacki/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

    The director of Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights will step down in January after seven years at the helm, dean of the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health Andrea Baccarelli announced Tuesday. News of her departure follows months of criticism of the center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights.

    Mary Bassett’s last day as director will be Jan. 9, 2026, after which she will remain a professor of practice in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department. Kari Nadeau, a professor of climate and population studies at Harvard, will serve as interim director. Bassett did not respond to a request for an interview Thursday. A Harvard spokesperson did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s questions about Bassett’s departure, including whether she was asked to step down, and instead pointed to Baccarelli’s message. 

    Baccarelli also announced that the center will shift its primary focus to children’s health.

    “Over the past years, FXB has worked on a wide range of programs within the context of human rights, extending across varied projects, including those related to oppression, poverty, and stigma around the world,” he wrote. “We believe we can accomplish more, and have greater impact, if we go deeper in a primary area of focus.”

    The center’s Palestine Program for Health and Human Rights drew increased scrutiny after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack in Israel, including from former Harvard president Larry Summers and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik. In previous years, the program partnered with Birzeit University in the West Bank, but Harvard declined to renew that partnership in the spring. In their April report on antisemitism on campus, Harvard officials detailed complaints from students about the program’s webinars, in which speakers allegedly “presented a demonizing view of Israel and Israelis.”

    “One student told us that the FXB programming created the impression that ‘Israel exists solely to oppress Palestinians, and nothing else,’” the report stated.

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  • College Aid Previews Aim to Improve Early Decision

    College Aid Previews Aim to Improve Early Decision

    With the imminent arrival of early-decision results comes a new round of hand-wringing about the admissions practice, which affords students a better chance of getting accepted to their top institution but requires them to commit if admitted.

    Critics argue that the practice disadvantages low- and middle-income students, who fear being locked into attending a college before they know if they can afford it—although many colleges with an early-decision option allow students to back out over financial constraints. It also prevents applicants from comparing financial aid offers across multiple institutions.

    “Because there is so much uncertainty, families with high incomes are more likely to choose early decision and therefore benefit from its more favorable odds. It’s the perfect tool for maximizing revenues at schools positioned as luxury products, with price tags to match,” wrote Daniel Currell, a former deputy under secretary and senior adviser at the Department of Education from 2018 to 2021, in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday that argued for the end of early decision. Indeed, Common App data about the fall 2021 freshman class showed that students from the wealthiest ZIP codes were twice as likely to apply early decision.

    But despite the criticisms, some institutions are aiming to make the practice more equitable. A handful of small liberal arts colleges have introduced initiatives in recent years to allow students to preview their financial aid offers before they decide whether or not to apply early, which admissions leaders say they hope will make lower-income students feel more comfortable taking the leap.

    Reed College, a selective liberal arts college in Oregon, began offering early-decision aid reviews this year, which allow early-decision applicants to request and view their full financial aid packages before they receive an actual decision from the university. Just like an official aid offer, the preview is calculated by financial aid staff using the College Scholarship Service profile.

    If they aren’t entirely comfortable with the amount of aid they’re set to receive—or they’d rather compare offers from other institutions—they can drop their application down into the early-action pool.

    “I just think that this anxiety that people have over not getting the best financial deal for their family has been a barrier for people saying, ‘This is my first-choice school and I want to do everything I can to increase my chances for admission,’” said Milyon Trulove, vice president and dean of admission and financial aid at Reed.

    Early financial aid offers are among the various steps institutions have taken in recent years to improve cost transparency and, in many cases, show students that their institutions are affordable. Others include improved cost estimators and campaigns offering free tuition for families under a particular income limit. Institutions hope that such innovations will help prevent students from writing off their institutions—particularly selective institutions that offer significant aid—due to their sticker prices.

    So far, Reed’s reviews appear to be doing a good job of enticing applicants who otherwise might not have applied early; the number of early-decision applicants this year increased 60 percent compared to last admissions cycle. Only one student has opted to switch to early action, which is nonbinding, after receiving their estimated offer.

    Similar programs at other institutions have also proven successful. Whitman College in Washington began offering early financial aid guarantees in 2020 to any prospective student who had filled out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid. The initiative wasn’t created specifically to promote early decision, said Adam Miller, vice president for admission and financial aid. But he said he hoped that making it clear to families that Whitman is affordable would also open doors for students interested in applying early decision but nervous about costs.

    Early-decision applications haven’t increased at Whitman like they did this year at Reed. But Miller noted that the college’s early-decision applicants are as socioeconomically diverse as the institution’s overall applicant pool, rather than skewing wealthier.

    “As we think about these nationwide conversations and the very valid criticism of early decision, we think that our approach allows us to have kind of a win-win,” he said. “We still get the benefit of students who are applying early, [so] that we can start to build our incoming class with some confidence,” while also eliminating financial uncertainty for families.

    Last year, the university’s four-person financial aid staff handled 546 requests for early aid guarantees. It’s an extra lift for the tiny office, but, Miller said, 410 of those students ended up applying—“so it’s not like we were doing a lot of extra work for students that we weren’t going to be doing it for anyway.”

    Macalester College also launched such a program in 2021. The institution, which typically admits between 35 and 40 percent of its incoming class from early decision, implemented aid previews in conjunction with a number of other steps aimed at improving access, including going test-optional and eliminating its application fee.

    “If we have an opportunity to do something that we think might be helpful to an individual student or family, I guess I feel as responsibility as an enrollment manager to try to initiate a new practice or new policy,” said Jeff Allen, vice president for admissions and financial aid at Macalester.

    Boosting Cost Transparency

    Financial aid experts said they see early financial aid calculations as a good option for institutions hoping to make the early-decision process—and college costs over all—more transparent.

    Students should be able to “apply early decision to a school where they know it’s the place for them and they don’t need to be saying, ‘But I need the financial aid so maybe this isn’t a good choice,’” said Jill Desjean, director of policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “That option should be available to anyone that finds the school where they really feel like they belong via early decision without having to factor in their finances, so any kind of early estimates, accurate early estimates—anything like that is a positive thing.”

    She noted that such programs might be too heavy of a lift for institutions receiving massive numbers of applications every year, but also that larger institutions have more resources and staffing to accommodate such requests.

    James Murphy, a senior fellow at Class Action, an advocacy organization focused on “reimagining elite higher education,” said that while he sees early aid previews as a positive step toward transparency, they don’t address some of his key concerns about early decision. At many expensive private high schools, he said, nearly every student applies early decision, whereas public high school students often aren’t even aware of the option.

    “There’s kind of a culture thing. If you go to Georgetown Prep … everybody’s applying early decision, or most students are applying early decision, unless they’re applying to Harvard or Stanford that don’t have it … When you look at public schools, that’s not nearly as common,” he said. “I think raising awareness of early decision as a viable option for more students is one step that higher education could take to make it a little bit more equitable.”

    He also noted that some institutions admit over half of their incoming classes from early-decision applicants, which dramatically lowers the chances for regular-admission applicants to be admitted.

    “The New York Times had that op-ed about banning it. That’s not going to happen. Colleges will fight so hard to make that not happen,” he said. But, he said, “what I would love to see is caps” on the percentage of students that can be admitted early decision.

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  • In Defense of Berkeley Instructor Peyrin Kao

    In Defense of Berkeley Instructor Peyrin Kao

    Peyrin Kao, a University of California, Berkeley, computer science lecturer, was suspended from teaching for a semester after UC Berkeley decreed that Kao’s criticism of Israel had violated campus bans on “political advocacy” in class. There are two significant problems with this action: Kao didn’t engage in advocacy in his class, and Berkeley’s rules don’t restrict political advocacy.

    The suspension of Kao reflects two alarming possibilities: Either Kao is being targeted for his criticism of Israel and there is selective persecution of faculty for leftist political beliefs, or Kao’s suspension shows a new, broader ban on all political speech in the classroom.

    The fact that this repression is happening at UC Berkeley—a top university in a blue state legendary for the Free Speech Movement and liberal politics—indicates how widespread censorship is across the country today.

    As Kao noted, “The university loves to talk about how they are ‘the free speech university,’ ‘the home of the free speech movement’ … but when it comes to Palestine: ‘Sorry, we’re drawing the line, your free speech does not apply.’”

    In October, UC Berkeley executive vice chancellor and provost Benjamin Hermalin wrote a letter determining that Kao was guilty of violating Regents Policy 2301 in two incidents.

    In 2023, Kao, after dismissing class, spoke for four minutes about ethics and technology, and expressed criticism of the Israeli government. In 2024, Kao informed students that he was on a hunger strike (without explaining why).

    It’s shocking that such trivial examples of advocacy could ever justify such a severe punishment. In the first case, Hermalin makes a ridiculous argument that what happens after a class is over is in fact part of the class.

    He writes, “Nothing in Regents Policy 2301 can be read to indicate it doesn’t apply when a course goes into ‘overtime.’” While it’s true that the rules about behavior during classes apply when instructors extend a class beyond the normal time (“overtime”), those limits end when the class is over. The Provost even quotes Kao’s words: “It is 2pm so class is officially over.” Once Kao says that, there is no overtime. There is only after-class time, and that time is not regulated by the Policy 2301 for course content. Of course, Kao’s brief comments on ethics in technology should be fully protected during a computer science class, but the fact that they happened outside of class means they cannot be regulated by these rules about classroom speech.

    The second alleged violation is even more ridiculous. Kao is accused of breaking the rules by uttering 20 words: “I’m currently undergoing a starvation diet for a cause that I believe in. If that sounds interesting, there’s a link.”

    The provost concluded, “I find Mr. Kao to have misused the classroom for the purpose of political advocacy, an action that constitutes a violation of Regents Policy 2301.”

    No, he didn’t, and no, it isn’t. Telling students that you’re on a starvation diet isn’t “political advocacy”; if Kao was ill or dieting for health reasons, he would be fully entitled to warn students of this fact in case it affected him, and nothing about these words is “political advocacy.” The same logic applies to a medical condition induced for political reasons.

    But the provost is also wrong on a much deeper level: There is no prohibition on “political advocacy” in Policy 2301. The word “advocacy” never appears in Policy 2301. Yet the provost proceeds to wonder “whether the instructor’s intent is to advocate” and frequently quotes his interviews rather than focusing on what he said in class and what Policy 2301 says. Political advocacy in the classroom is fundamentally protected by academic freedom.

    Astonishingly, the provost even asked, “To what extent is a hunger strike an in-class advocacy activity precluded by Regents Policy 2301?” In what bizarro world could a hunger strike ever be deemed “in-class advocacy”? Refusing to eat during class is not “advocacy” at all. The suggestion that Regents Policy 2301 could be interpreted to require teachers to eat outside the classroom is insane.

    The provost noted, “His actions are no different from those of an instructor who repeatedly wore a t-shirt when teaching that had on it a very visible political symbol or a picture of a political candidate.” Wait, does the provost actually think that professors are banned from wearing T-shirts with symbols on them? Will a professor with a peace symbol T-shirt be hauled before the provost for dress code violations? Wait until the provost finds out that some professors wear crosses while teaching—I’m sure that will be quickly prohibited by any fair-minded ban on advocacy.

    Perhaps UC Berkeley professors need to start wearing T-shirts with the First Amendment on them to remind the provost why we must not allow political commissars to dictate what teachers wear, say or think.

    Zach Greenberg of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression argued, “If you’re going on tangents during class or expressing a political advocacy to students during class as a professor, you’re on company time.” But the whole concept of academic freedom is a rejection of “company time.” Academic freedom in the classroom means that the instructor, not the company, decides what is taught. The classroom is “professional time” where instructors must meet professional standards. But professional standards allow for wide leeway to go on tangents, discuss broader issues and even chat with students about nonprofessional topics. If there is a professor who has never uttered any words in any class unrelated to the course topic, I would love to meet that weirdo.

    If a professor is wasting half of every class on a tangent unrelated to the course, then that professor should be disciplined. But the reason for the discipline must be politically neutral and disconnected from any viewpoint discrimination. A professor who expresses political views in class is no different from a professor who expresses views about the football team or a professor who discusses the weather (in a class unrelated to it). All of them are engaging in speech not germane to the class.

    But no one can seriously argue that a four-minute statement after class about ethics in technology or a 20-word comment about being on a hunger strike could possibly describe an instructor who is failing to teach the content of the class by going on constant tangents.

    The fact that Kao’s words were repeatedly described as “political” is not evidence of Kao’s guilt, but proof of the administration’s guilt. By targeting Kao purely for his political speech, and applying standards that would never be used for similar noncontroversial speech, the Berkeley administration is confessing to its violation of the First Amendment and standards of academic freedom that protect faculty from retaliation for their views.

    Policy 2301 is a terrible policy, enacted in 1970 by the regents to suppress free speech, and it violates standards of academic freedom and the First Amendment by targeting “political indoctrination” (rather than all “indoctrination”) and therefore engages in viewpoint discrimination against disfavored political views.

    But even Policy 2301 does not allow the kind of repression demanded by the provost, which is why he doesn’t quote any of its specific provisions in claiming Kao’s alleged violation of it.

    The provost repeatedly accuses Kao of being “at odds with the spirit of Regents Policy 2301” but fails to quote anything in the policy he actually violated. Suspensions cannot be justified by “spirits”; they can only be legitimate if there is a clear violation of the rule.

    The provost’s report is so grossly incompetent—fabricating clauses about “advocacy” that don’t exist in a policy he apparently hasn’t read—that it shows how arbitrary this act of political retaliation was.

    Writing that the punishment was “up to you,” the provost gave his subordinates an implicit order to suspend Kao with only one other option: “I would have no objection if you wished to impose a more severe disciplinary action than the one I proposed.” Obviously, he would object to anything less than a suspension, and the resulting suspension is not surprising to anyone. It is highly unprofessional for a top administrator to personally intervene in a discipline case in order to manipulate the outcome and decree what punishment must be given.

    The repressive administrative overreaction at Berkeley is precisely why we must give enormous freedom to instructors to do things that we think are wrong. Unless you protect the right of faculty to say dumb and inappropriate things in their classes, people driven mad by the possession of administrative power will seek to fire professors for what they say and do outside of class.

    We should want professors who feel free to express their values and their ideas openly, even when it offends some people. We should reject a world where every professor must fear saying a disapproved word in a classroom where every utterance is monitored for wrongthink.

    I don’t agree with Kao’s goals of campus divestment from Israel. I don’t agree with Kao’s tactics of engaging in a hunger strike. And I don’t agree with Kao’s methods of discussing his views in or after his classes.

    But Kao did not violate any university rules, and it is fundamentally unjust to suspend him for purely political reasons. People are free to criticize him for his ideas, but not to censor him or punish him for expressing them.

    UC Berkeley administrators have violated Kao’s academic freedom and the First Amendment in their shameful punishment of him for his free speech, and they deserve condemnation not only for this unjust act against Kao but also for the much larger chilling effect this repression will cause across the University of California.

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