Tag: Events

  • University President Elected Lt. Gov. of New Jersey

    University President Elected Lt. Gov. of New Jersey

    Caldwell has served as president of Centenary University since 2023.

    Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

    As running mate to Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill, Centenary University president Dale Caldwell, a Democrat, won the New Jersey gubernatorial race on Tuesday in a 56 percent–to–43 percent victory over Republicans Jack Ciattarelli and James Gannon. 

    “Every single day of this campaign has been a reminder of what a special place New Jersey is,” Caldwell wrote on X Wednesday. “I’m humbled and honored to be your next Lieutenant Governor.”

    Caldwell has served as president of Centenary, a Methodist university in Hackettstown, N.J., since 2023. Prior to assuming the presidency, he served on Centenary’s board, and he is also a pastor at Covenant United Methodist Church in Plainfield. Caldwell was the university’s first Black president and in January will become New Jersey’s first Black lieutenant governor.  

    “Centenary University would like to congratulate Gov. Elect Mikie Sherrill and Lt. Gov. Elect Dale Caldwell, Ed.D., on their victory in the recent New Jersey gubernatorial election,” university officials wrote in a statement Wednesday. 

    Centenary officials have not yet announced who will serve as interim president or their plans to find a permanent replacement when Caldwell departs in January.

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  • UC Can Hire Undocumented Students

    UC Can Hire Undocumented Students

    The California Supreme Court chose not to review a lower court’s decision that concluded the University of California system is discriminating against undocumented students by not allowing them to work in on-campus jobs. As a result, the lower court decision stands, the Los Angeles Times reported.

    The California Supreme Court’s move not to take up the case is the latest development in a lawsuit filed by a University of California, Los Angeles, alumnus and lecturer last year. The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys from Altshuler Berzon LLP, UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

    Undocumented students, backed by a legal theory developed by scholars at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy, have argued that state entities, such as the public university system, are permitted to hire undocumented individuals. But the UC Board of Regents rejected the idea last year.

    A three-judge panel for the Court of Appeal for the First District ruled in August that the UC system’s employment policy “facially discriminates based on immigration status and, in light of applicable state law, the discriminatory policy cannot be justified.” The ruling asked the system to reconsider its hiring policy. But the UC Board of Regents appealed that decision two months ago.

    UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz said in a statement that the California Supreme Court’s decision “creates serious legal risks for the University and all other state employers in California.”

    But undocumented students and their advocates are celebrating. Iliana G. Perez, a plaintiff and former UCLA lecturer, said as a formerly undocumented immigrant, she’s seen how employment restrictions can hold immigrant students back.

    “The California Supreme Court’s decision not only reaffirms that discriminating against undocumented immigrants from accessing on-campus employment cannot continue to be tolerated, but it also gives the UC the clarity to finally unlock life-changing opportunities for the thousands of immigrant students who contribute to its campuses, and to the state’s economy and workforce,” Perez said in a news release from the Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

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  • Would We Rather Humanities “Be Ruined Than Changed”? (opinion

    Would We Rather Humanities “Be Ruined Than Changed”? (opinion

    Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy.

    Our Greek forebears, as early as Hippocrates, coined the term “kρίσις” to describe a “turning point”; kρίσις, a word related to the Proto-Indo-European root krei-, is etymologically connected to practices like “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging.” In fact, the most widely mentioned skill we humanists offer our students, critical thinking, originates from the same practice of deliberate “sieving.” Thus, when we call ourselves critics and write critical theory, we admit that crisis might just be our natural habitat.

    What’s Different This Time Around?

    A look at the helpful statistics provided by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences indicates that this latest crisis in humanities enrollments and degree completions is not like the previous fluctuations in our history, but more foundational. Things sounded bad enough when a state flagship like West Virginia University slashed modern languages (and math!) two years ago. But when that beacon of humanistic learning, the University of Chicago, pauses Ph.D. admissions across all but two of its humanities programs, we know the crisis is existential. Wasn’t it Chicago’s Kalven report that once stated boldly, and for the entire nation, that the university was “the home and sponsor of critics”?

    Cultures of Complaint, and a Pinch of Hubris

    Feeling powerless in the face of dwindling enrollment and support for our disciplines, some of us have resorted to digging up conspiracy theories, perhaps because, as Stanley Fish opined, in the psychic economy of academic critics, “oppression is the sign of virtue.” The tenor of such virtue-signaling complaints is that an unholy alliance of tech and business bros and their programs, together with politicians and academic leaders, promote only “useful” disciplines and crowd out interest in the humanities.

    I think intellectual honesty would demand we remember that it was the humanities, custodians of high-culture education (Bildung), that once upon a time crowded out the applied arts, crafts and technologies, accusing them of lacking intellectual depth. Humanistic Ivy League and Oxbridge schools championed the classics, philosophy and literary studies as “liberal” and sneered at professional education in the “mechanical arts” (engineering, agriculture, business, etc.) as “servile.” When the humanities (and natural sciences) faculty at these elite colleges refused to open their classist “gentlemen’s education” to larger publics, land-grant universities and technological institutes emerged to increase access and to educate teachers, lawyers and engineers.

    Could it be that today’s humanists still retain some of this original hubris toward technical, vocational and applied training, which makes the current inversion of disciplinary hierarchy even tougher to accept? Are warnings against instrumentalizing the humanities for economic gain (Martha C. Nussbaum, Not for Profit) or applying them to support vocational or technical disciplines (Frank Donoghue, The Last Professors) echoes of such hubris? Will this mentality, based on the knowledge economy of the late 19th century, convince today’s students to work with us?

    Angsting About Ancillarity

    The modernist poet W. H. Auden, in his book-length poem about anxiety, wrote that “We would rather be ruined than changed / We would rather die in our dread / Than climb the cross of the moment / And let our illusions die.” For sure, some among us deny the signs of the time, yearning for the golden days when humanities departments were ever expanding, arguing that an essential third Victorianist (focusing on drama) be added to the colleagues already focusing on fiction and poetry. If these golden days ever existed (in the early 1970s?), they are gone now. Nostalgia for the simulacrum persists.

    Closer to reality, many colleagues in the humanities have been “climbing the cross of the moment,” adapting to the inversion of disciplinary hierarchies at our institutions and accepting the mandate to show at least some measurable outcomes instead of our beloved unquantifiable humanistic critique. We have been aligning with the new lead disciplines by creating a vast infrastructure of certificates, degrees, journals, book series and organizations in the medical, health, digital, environmental and energy humanities, in science and technology studies, computational media, and music technology.

    However, as Colin Potts observed, when we partner with our colleagues in these better-funded and high-visibility disciplines, we are rarely “co-equal contributors.” We are like alms seekers, condensing our lifelong training and knowledge into an ethics, civics and policy module required for our partners’ accreditation, or infusing technical writing and communication skills into a STEM curriculum to amplify their majors’ impact. These collaborations offer a modicum of recognition and an honorable mention in a holistically minded National Academies consensus report. But they also make us feel dreadfully ancillary.

    Institutional strategic plans that exalt the value of the humanities with terms like “cornerstone,” “core” and “heart” only deepen our suspicions, especially when our budgets don’t match the performative strategic grandiloquence. From the medieval through the 18th-century university, the humanities suffered the trauma of being “handmaidens to theology” (ancillae theologiae), then the doctrinal master discipline. Now, technology has taken theology’s place, and we are once again “pleasant (but more or less inconsequential) helpmeets.” Trauma redux.

    Hyperbole Won’t Help

    In an existential crisis, hyperbole in the defense of our field no longer feels like a vice. Therefore, some of us now claim that the end of the humanities heralds the end of humanity and human civilization. Brenna Gerhardt, for example, warned that, because of the 2025 funding cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities, “we may find that a society that forgets to ask what it means to be human forgets how to be one.”

    Similarly, the 2024 World Humanities Report asserts that “the humanities are of critical importance” at a time when the “world and planet [are] under duress” and in dire need of “tools and concepts that will foster change and help us live under these shared, if still uneven, conditions.” These kinds of well-meaning statements, and the desperate daily news item (preferably from Oxbridge) amplifying our relevance and adaptability, burden the academic humanities with a responsibility incommensurate with the cultural and educational work we can perform. Their claim that “either you support the humanities, or inhumanity prevails” scares only us, but nobody else. As the authors of WhatEvery1Says: The Humanities in Public Discourse find, “The humanities appear to the public to be siloed in universities (unlike the sciences).”

    This I Believe

    If the previous paragraphs didn’t sound resilient and hopeful enough, please remember that my first obligation as a humanist is to be a critic, not a cheerleader. I believe that the humanities do have an important place in the ecosystem of higher education and at each university, that integrating STEM and liberal arts practices increases student success and leads to better research and scholarship, that humanistic considerations contribute to a more just and benign world, and that we need to continue our important work in core education.

    However, I don’t think that we academic humanists have sufficient standing to make hyperbolic claims about what we can achieve. Just consider: Have we ever advanced how many majors and faculty positions would be enough to keep the world humane and civilized? Have we, as Roosevelt Montás asks in Rescuing Socrates, ever overcome the “crisis of consensus … about what things are most worth knowing”? And should we lecture our STEM colleagues on ethics and gender equity when, as recently as 2019, fewer than one-third of tenure-track faculty and fewer than one-fourth of non-tenure- track professors in U.S. philosophy departments were women?

    We humanists are really good at asking critical questions, “sieving,” “discriminating” and “judging” at the highest levels of abstraction, but we are not so good at offering solutions. When we do, they often come from the same intellectual heights that have alienated us from undergraduate populations and the public. In a recent essay for the Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Wayne Stables takes us beyond hyperbole. He asks us to envision our lives and work “as if the humanities were dead,” thereby (he hopes) freeing us to consider collective action based on the likes of G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Wendy Brown. He believes this kind of “critical orientation” may help us survive “the troubling interregnum” in which we now find ourselves.

    While I sympathize with Stables’s call to action (though I would add Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, bell hooks and Judith Butler to his list), I believe it takes us back to the time when the humanities strove to be “all breathing human passion far above.”

    I recommend we befriend the idea that our humanistic values and practices may relate to more public-oriented and holistic goals, as exemplified by the University of Arizona’s successful degree in the public and applied humanities, which wants “to translate the personal enrichment of humanities study into public enrichment and the direct and tangible improvement of the human condition” and offers a “fundamentally experimental, entrepreneurial, and transdisciplinary” educational experience that “focuses on public and private opportunities that straddle rather than fall between purviews, or are confined by them.”

    Since the introduction of this new kind of humanities program, connected with such fields as business, engineering and medicine, the number of students majoring in the humanities at Arizona has increased by 76 percent. This true kind of integrated partnership, and similar initiatives at St. Anselm College, Virginia Tech and my home institution of Georgia Tech, give me hope for a turning point—kρίσις—for the humanities in higher education.

    Richard Utz is senior associate dean for strategic initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Institute of Technology.

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  • Partial Victory for Freedom of the Press at Indiana U

    Partial Victory for Freedom of the Press at Indiana U

    The decision by Indiana University administrators to allow the Indiana Daily Student newspaper to resume occasional publication is a victory for the advocates of free expression on campus. The Student Press Law Center, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the American Association of University Professors, along with student newspapers across the country, spoke out loudly in defense of Indiana student journalists. Particular praise goes to the students at the Purdue Exponent, which printed the censored homecoming issue of the Indiana Daily Student and distributed it around Bloomington, Ind., in solidarity with fellow journalists.

    It’s rare for administrators to quickly reverse course and effectively admit they made a mistake. But while we need to celebrate a win, we also need to recognize how partial and temporary it was—and the enormous threat to freedom of the press that still exists at Indiana and beyond.

    What Indiana University administrators did was one of the worst attacks on a free press at a public university in the history of American higher education. It combined three of the most terrible types of censorship of the press: 1) imposing massive content restrictions by attempting to ban the newspaper from printing any news, 2) banning the newspaper completely from being printed when the editors refused to obey these unlawful demands and 3) firing the professor who served as newspaper adviser, student media director Jim Rodenbush, for defending freedom of the press.

    While the first two forms of repression have now been (temporarily) lifted, the last one still remains. When the newspaper adviser who was fired for opposing censorship remains fired, it’s still censorship. And Chancellor David Reingold’s decision to allow the newspaper to publish still includes severe budget cutbacks and elimination of university support for the publication.

    Suppression of a free press at Indiana is linked to its broader repression of free expression. FIRE recently ranked Indiana University as the worst public university in America for free speech (and the student newspaper’s article about this ranking reportedly was one of the reasons why the administration cracked down on the free press). The repression by Indiana administrators has been astonishing. In December 2023, Indiana University suspended professor Abdulkader Sinno for the crime of reserving a room for an event critical of Israel. At the same time, the administration also canceled its art museum exhibit of abstract art paintings by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian American artist who had been critical of the Israeli government. In 2024, Indiana officials banned all expression on campus between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., which a federal judge paused while an ACLU lawsuit against the censorship continues.

    In my 2020 report for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement about freedom of the press on campus, I noted some of the severe threats to free expression: punishing independent media advisers who fail to rein in student newspapers, censoring campus papers directly, restricting access to campus, limiting the rights of faculty and staff to speak to reporters, and many more. But perhaps the greatest threat to journalism on campus is economic, when student newspapers are defunded and eventually decline from a thousand budget cuts.

    The dire economic environment for newspapers across the country has also affected student publications. The drop in advertising revenue has hit campus newspapers, and many universities would rather put resources into public relations staff under the control of administrators rather than support student journalists who challenge them.

    What universities can do to respect freedom of the press: First, do no harm. Stop trying to censor newspapers. Enact free expression policies that protect freedom of the campus press and the rights of their advisers and sources.

    Second, integrate journalism into the curriculum. Offer classes about journalism, but recognize that many different classes (and especially writing-focused classes) can encourage students to publish their work, both online and in print. Good journalism is just good writing, and colleges should encourage students to publicly express their ideas on a wide range of topics.

    Third, support campus journalism financially. Colleges ought to provide a substantial fund to campus newspapers to publish ads promoting events and activities on campus. By allocating this money for newspaper ads and then allowing campus programs and student organizations to freely use it for their events, colleges can promote what they are doing while supporting independent journalism. The belief that student newspapers shouldn’t be subsidized and must independently finance every word they print is a strange concept for colleges that are devoted to subsidizing the free exchange of ideas.

    Student newspapers are the most important extramural activity on college campuses, and more essential than much of the courses, research and administrative work that receives vastly greater funding. A campus newspaper is more than just a critical source of information about what happens at colleges: It’s an education for writers and readers alike. It’s a bridge between the campus and the community, where growing news deserts make student papers more important than ever. And the campus newspaper is a symbol of intellectual debate, the most public place at a college where ideas are exchanged and arguments between different viewpoints are heard.

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  • UC to Stop Funding Systemwide Postdoc Program

    UC to Stop Funding Systemwide Postdoc Program

    To date, the system has spent $162 million on fellows’ salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

    Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

    Starting next fall, the University of California system office will no longer pay for the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, a fellowship established in 1984 to encourage more women and minority Ph.D.s to pursue academic careers.

    The fellowship program, available at all 10 UC campuses and three national laboratories, has inspired numerous copycats at other state universities, including at the University of Maryland, the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University. But its focus on recruiting diverse candidates has also been criticized by conservatives who claim it’s a pipeline for young hires with radical leftist politics.

    The UC system office will stop providing financial support for the program beginning with fellows hired after summer 2025, a system spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. Since 2003, the UC system office has paid the $85,000 salaries of PPFP fellows for their first five years on the faculty; then the UC campus where they are employed takes over. To date, the system has spent $162 million on PPFP faculty salaries, averaging about $7.36 million per year.

    “Due to the severe budget constraints currently facing UC, the PPFP faculty hiring incentive is sunsetting as of fall 2025,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “While the University will continue to provide five years of salary support to PPFP fellows hired by summer 2025 and in earlier years, no new incentives will be provided going forward. Campuses will still be able to hire PPFP fellows as part of their normal search and hiring processes, but the additional financial contribution from the incentive program will no longer be available.”

    The University of California system is facing a decline in state funding and pressure from the Trump administration to implement a number of changes that weaken or abolish diversity, equity and inclusion practices. In March, former system president Michael Drake announced a systemwide hiring freeze and other cost-saving measures. At the same time, the system board prohibited campus officials from asking job candidates to submit a diversity statement as part of the hiring process. In August, the Trump administration demanded that the University of California, Los Angeles, pay a $1.2 billion fine for allegedly failing to address antisemitism on campus, as well as overhaul numerous policies related to admissions, hiring, athletics, scholarships, gender identity and discrimination.

    In a thread posted to Bluesky, Sarah Roberts, a professor of information studies, gender studies and labor studies at UCLA, called the PPFP program a “jewel in the crown for faculty development and recruitment at the University of California.”

    “To my mind, not only is this a direct attack by a UC central admin content to capitulate and emulate the federal position that arrived via extortion letter, it is part of a much larger plan, congruent with UC central admin, of weakening and eliminating faculty governance and power,” Roberts wrote about the decision to end funding for the program.

    Despite its origins, the PPFP no longer explicitly seeks women and minority candidates and instead considers applicants “whose life experiences and educational background would help to broaden the perspectives represented in the faculty of the University of California,” according to the website.

    This is a recent change; in 2024, the PPFP webpage included the tagline “advancing excellence through faculty diversity.” The criteria also stated that “faculty reviewers will evaluate candidates according to their academic accomplishments, the strength of their research proposal, and their potential for faculty careers that will contribute to diversity and equal opportunity through their teaching, research and service. Faculty reviewers also may consider the mentor’s potential to work productively with the candidate and commitment to equity and diversity in higher education.”

    The PPFP, and fellow-to-faculty programs at large, have drawn criticism from conservatives including John D. Sailer, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute who has written extensively on the programs. He believes they allow universities to recruit scholars who “embrace positions on the fringes of leftist politics.”

    “Ideological screening has downstream consequences for our sensemaking institutions,” Sailer wrote in a February article. “Ultimately, the fellow-to-faculty model pushes conformity across once-distinct academic fields. As the UC professor put it, ‘it erodes disciplinary boundaries,’ flattening all forms of inquiry into a discussion of race and oppression.”

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  • Trinity Christian College Announces Closure

    Trinity Christian College Announces Closure

    Trinity Christian College outside Chicago will close at the end of the current 2025–26 academic year due to insurmountable financial pressures.

    The college announced the move Tuesday, citing a litany of challenges, which include “post-Covid financial losses; persistent operating deficits; a decline in college enrollment and increased competition for students; and a shift in donor giving and financial circumstances,” according to a statement from officials posted on a frequently asked questions webpage.

    Acting President Jeanine Mozie said in a video message that the Board of Trustees considered multiple options to address “significant and rapidly evolving financial challenges,” but ultimately, there was “no sustainable path forward for our beloved institution.”

    The FAQ page noted that the Board of Trustees considered “significant programmatic changes, strategic partnerships, and the like” but “determined that these and other alternatives were insufficient to overcome the college’s deficit” and sustain Trinity’s mission over the long term.

    The closure announcement follows a recent leadership change at the college. Former president Aaron Kuecker resigned in August after less than two years in the top job but nearly 14 at Trinity altogether. Multiple staff members were also reportedly laid off in August.

    A review of the college’s finances shows that Trinity operated at a loss in eight of the last 10 fiscal years and relied significantly on a small pool of donors. An estimated 76 percent of all financial contributions came from just three donors in 2024, according to Trinity’s latest audit.

    Trinity also had less and less cash on hand. According to the audit, “cash and cash equivalents” fell from nearly $7.2 million in fiscal year 2023 to just under $5 million—a drop of nearly 31 percent. Trinity also had a meager endowment, valued at $11 million at the end of the 2024 fiscal year. (A recent study found the median endowment across the sector is $243 million.)

    Bondholders warned the college in June that Trinity was at risk of violating its financial covenants because of its limited liquidity, according to publicly available documents.

    Both faculty numbers and student head count had dropped in recent years, bond documents show. Both of those numbers have been in decline in recent years with total faculty falling from 145 to 126 and enrollment dropping from a total head count of 1,068 in fall 2019 to 872 last year, despite a recent tuition reset to attract students. Trinity aimed to hit 1,081 students by the 2027–28 academic year, financial documents show.

    Trinity was founded by Chicago businessmen in 1959 and is located on a 56-acre campus in Palos Heights, Ill., outside Chicago, which was recently estimated to be worth $25 million.

    College officials announced teach-out and transfer agreements with Calvin University in Michigan as well as Olivet Nazarene University and Saint Xavier University, both of which are in Illinois.

    Trinity follows several other small, cash-strapped Christian colleges that have announced closures this year, some of which have shut down abruptly, such as Limestone University and St. Andrews University. Siena Heights University, a Roman Catholic institution, also announced plans to close. On the secular side, Northland College in Wisconsin closed earlier this year, and Pennsylvania State University announced plans to shut down seven rural campuses by 2027 after years of shrinking enrollment.

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  • The Push for Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point (opinion)

    The Push for Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point (opinion)

    Much of the controversy around the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” has focused on its push for viewpoint diversity and the claim that open inquiry does not exist in our classrooms. That push builds on a long-standing conservative critique that today makes hay out of the fact that the vast majority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities lean left.

    Recent data supports that claim. In elite institutions, like Duke and Harvard Universities, surveys suggest the number of faculty identifying as liberal exceeds 60 percent. The percentages differ not only by type of institution but by discipline, with the humanities and social sciences leaning more liberal than STEM. Some even claim that political bias corrupts academic disciplines.

    Liberal faculty and commentators on higher education sometimes take the bait and respond defensively to what often is a politically motivated attack. In an op-ed in The Guardian, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd argued that the purpose of the conservative critique has been “to delegitimize the academy … [and] return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy.”

    Whether or not she is right, you don’t have to look hard to see that institutions of higher education are feeling growing pressure to right their ships—to create campuses and classrooms where open inquiry flourishes, where students feel free to say what they think and to challenge ideas they disagree with. Colleges have responded by scrambling to incorporate more ideological diversity into their course offerings, to implement new programming and to recruit guest speakers who challenge progressive thinking.

    All this misses the point and distracts us from the work that needs to be done to further improve the quality of the education students receive in American colleges and universities. Put simply, instead of fixating on who is in the classroom and whether they are liberal or conservative, we should be focused on how we are in the room.

    Higher education’s greatest challenge to achieving open inquiry is not one of ideology or viewpoint diversity, but of disposition. Harvard University’s 2024 report from a working group on open inquiry gestured in this direction but did not flesh it out.

    If we are to truly commit to open inquiry, we need to step back, pause and reflect not just on what we think, but on how we acquire knowledge, how we think, whether we are interested in learning more or if we are content with what we already know.

    You can decorate campuses with all the colors of the political rainbow but not make them better places to learn.

    The issue is how we show up with others. Data suggests that students in our classrooms don’t feel comfortable pushing back on each other or on their professors when they disagree. They engage in what psychologists Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman call “performative virtue-signaling.”

    In conversations with students at Amherst College, we have heard that they are not just constraining their expression in academic settings but in social settings, too. It seems we are afraid of each other.

    It is no wonder. The academic and public squares have not proven themselves to be especially kind or generous as of late. We need look no further than the vitriolic reactions to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the as-vitriolic reactions to the reactions to his murder. When we do, we can see that the rush to righteousness operates across the ideological spectrum.

    The work of college education is to dislodge the instinct to judge and replace it with a commitment to rigorous listening. The work of college teachers is to model an approach to the world that puts empathy before criticism.

    What if instead of just talking about the right to speech, we emphasized the right to listen? But we don’t just mean any kind of listening; we mean listening in a certain way. Deep listening. The kind of listening that takes in ideas in slow, big gulps and lets them settle deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably.

    It is listening that seeks to catch ideas in flight and carry them further. This is a disciplined kind of listening that resists defensiveness and instead burrows into curiosity.

    To foster it, we have to cultivate in ourselves and in our students a disposition to wonder. Why does someone think that way? What experiences, places, relationships, institutions and social forces have shaped their thinking? How did they get to that argument? How did they get to that feeling? How is it that they could arrive at a different perspective than I did?

    This is the heart of open inquiry, and it is much harder to achieve than it is to bring more conservatives to campus. Without the disposition to wonder, doing so will produce enclaves, not engagement, on even the most ideologically diverse campus.

    This kind of open inquiry would demand that we remove the stance of moral certainty and righteousness from our ways and practices of thinking. That is the real work that needs to animate our colleges and universities.

    It is hard, slow work. There is no magic bullet. Teachers and their students, liberals and conservatives, have to commit to it.

    While open inquiry is a social disposition, it is also about how we orient our thinking when we are alone. We need to challenge our students to wonder not just about others but about themselves.

    What would happen if we all got into the habit of asking ourselves: When was the last time we changed our mind about something? When was the last time we left a conversation or finished a text and actually grappled with our orientation to a subject?

    We yearn for our students to practice open inquiry not just when they are in our classrooms, but when they are in the library or in their dorm room with a book to read, an equation to solve, a painting to finish.

    The promise of this type of inquiry is exhilarating, freeing. And it opens up great possibilities of seeing the world differently or in more complicated ways.

    At the end of the day, the literary scholar Peter Brooks gets it right when he says, “To honor, even only nominally, the call for ‘viewpoint diversity’ is to succumb to a logic that is at its heart hostile to the academic enterprise.” At the heart of that enterprise is a belief that viewpoint diversity is not the same thing as open inquiry. That belief requires changing the culture of learning on our campuses.

    Maybe the shift does not seem responsive to the political clamor of the moment. Maybe it sounds like it demands too much and will be hard to assess.

    But whatever the case, it feels revolutionary to us.

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

    Leah Schmalzbauer is the Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in the Social Sciences and associate provost and associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College.

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  • Innovation Project Experience Designer at Grand Valley

    Innovation Project Experience Designer at Grand Valley

    Are you leading a search for a role at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change? Today, we hear from Eric Kunnen, senior director of IT innovation and research at Grand Valley State University, who is recruiting for an innovation project experience designer.

    Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

    A: Put simply, the IT innovation and research team’s futurEDlab is on a mission to unite faculty, staff and students to spark innovation and help shape the future of education. At Grand Valley State University, our Reach Higher Strategic Plan highlights the value of innovation as well as the university’s commitment to empowering learners and enriching society. Specifically, this role contributes to enhancing education through incubating ideas and facilitating project management in our work to design, develop and deliver innovative immersive experiences leveraging emerging technologies.

    Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

    A: The innovation project experience designer at GVSU will serve on the information technology division’s innovation and research team, engaging across the university through partnerships and interdisciplinary partnerships.

    Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

    A: In year one, success includes catalyzing our project intake and management operational procedures within the futurEDlab, building momentum, capacity, efficiency and effectiveness as we deliver high-impact innovation experiences at Grand Valley State University. In three years, this role will be pivotal as we increase the value of digital transformation in teaching and learning as part of the innovation pipeline with the Blue Dot Lab ecosystem.

    Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

    A: Future roles for this position include coordination, management, leadership and innovation pathways in higher education, such as innovation strategy, digital transformation and senior level innovation program and project management.

    Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. Featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.

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  • Students, Unions to Protest Trump’s Higher Ed Agenda Friday

    Students, Unions to Protest Trump’s Higher Ed Agenda Friday

    Members of the American Association of University Professors, the affiliated American Federation of Teachers and student groups are planning protests in more than 50 cities Friday against “the Trump administration’s broad assault” on higher ed, the AAUP announced in a news release.

    The AAUP said demonstrators will urge institutions to continue rejecting Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” and instead “commit to the freedom to teach, learn, research, and speak out without government coercion or censorship.”

    “From attacks on academic freedom in the classroom to the defunding of life-saving scientific research to surveilling and arresting peaceful student protesters, Trump’s higher education policies have been catastrophic for our communities and our democracy,” AAUP president Todd Wolfson said in the release. “We’re excited to help build a coalition of students and workers united in fighting back for a higher education system that is accessible and affordable for all and serves the common good.”

    The protests are part of a progressive movement called Students Rise Up, or Project Rise Up. The Action Network website says there will be “walkouts and protests at hundreds of schools” Friday—the start of a buildup “to a mass student strike on May 1st, 2026, when we’ll join workers in the streets to disrupt business as usual.”

    “We’re demanding free college, a fair wage for workers, and schools where everyone is safe to learn and protest—regardless of their gender or race or immigration status,” the website says.

    Other groups listed as organizing or supporting the protests include the Campus Climate Network, College Democrats of America, Florida Youth Action Fund, Frontline for Freedom, Higher Ed Labor United, Ohio Student Association, Sunrise Movement, Dissenters, Feminist Generation, Gen-Z for Change, Generation Vote (GenVote), March for Our Lives, Oil and Gas Action Network, Socialist Alternative, Together Across America, Voters of Tomorrow, Blue Future, Get Free, and NOW Young Feminists.

    Asked for a comment from the Education Department, Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications, repeated statements the department previously made, saying, “The Trump Administration is achieving reforms on higher education campuses that conservatives have dreamed about for 50 years.”

    “Institutions are once again committed to enforcing federal civil rights laws consistently, they are rooting out DEI and unconstitutional race preferences, and they are acknowledging sex as a biological reality in sports and intimate spaces,” she wrote.

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  • Anatomy of the Research Statement (opinion)

    Anatomy of the Research Statement (opinion)

    The research statement that you include in your promotion and tenure dossier is one of the most important documents of your scholarly career—and one you’ll have little experience writing or even reading, unless you have a generous network of senior colleagues. As an academic editor, I support a half dozen or so academics each year as they revise (and re-revise, and throw out, and retrieve from the bin, and re-revise again) and submit their research statements and P&T dossiers. My experience is with—and so these recommendations are directed at—tenure-track researchers at American R-1s and R-2s and equivalent Canadian and Australian institutions.

    In my experience, most academics are good at describing what their research is and how and why they do it, but few feel confident in crafting a research statement that attests to the impact of their accomplishments. And “impact” is a dreaded word across the disciplines—one that implies reducing years of labor to mere numbers that fail to account for the depth, quality or importance of your work.

    When I think about “impact,” I think of course of the conventional metrics, but I think as well of your work’s influence among your peers in academia, and also of its resonance in nonacademic communities, be they communities of clinicians, patients, people with lived experiences of illness or oppression, people from a specific equity-deserving group, or literal neighborhoods that can be outlined on a map. When I edit research statements, I support faculty to shift their language from “I study X” to “My study of X has achieved Y” or “My work on X has accomplished Z.” This shift depends on providing evidence to show how your work has changed other people’s lives, work or thinking.

    For researchers who seek to make substantial contributions outside of academia—to cure a major disease, to change national policy or legislation—such a focus on impact, influence and resonance can be frustratingly short-termist. Yet if it is your goal to improve the world beyond the boundaries of your classroom and campus, then it seems worthwhile to find ways to show whether and how you are making progress toward that goal.

    If you’re preparing to go up for tenure or promotion, here’s a basic framework for a research statement, which you can adopt and adapt as you prepare your own impact-, influence- or resonance-focused research statement:

    Paragraph 1—Introduction

    Start with a high-level description of your overarching program of research. What big question unites the disparate parts of your work? What problem are you working toward solving? If your individual publications, presentations and grants were puzzle pieces, what big picture would they form?

    Paragraph 2—Background (Optional)

    Briefly sketch the background that informed your current preoccupations. Draw, if relevant, on your personal or professional background before your graduate studies. This paragraph should be short and should emphasize how your pre-academic life laid the foundation that has prepared you, uniquely, to address the key concerns that now occupy your intellectual life. For folks in some disciplines or institutions, this paragraph will be irrelevant and shouldn’t be included: trust your gut, or, if in doubt, ask a trusted senior colleague.

    Middle Paragraphs—Research Themes, Topics or Areas

    Cluster thematically—usually into two, three or four themes—the topics or areas into which your disparate projects and publications can be categorized. Within each theme, identify what you’re interested in and, if your methods are innovative, how you work to advance scholarly understandings of your subject. Depending on the expected length of your research statement, you might write three or four paragraphs for each theme. Each paragraph should identify external funding that you secured to advance your work and point to any outputs—publications, conference presentations, journal special issues, monographs, edited books, keynotes, invited talks, events, policy papers, white papers, end-user training guides, patents, op-eds and so on—that you produced.

    If the output is more than a few years old, you’ll also want to identify what impact (yes) that output had on other people. Doing so might involve pointing at your numbers of citations, but you might also:

    • Describe the diversity of your citations (e.g., you studied frogs but your research is cited in studies of salmon, belugas and bears, suggesting the broad importance of your work across related subfields);
    • Search the Open Syllabus database to identify the number of institutions that include your important publication in their teaching, or WorldCat, to identify the number of countries in which your book is held;
    • Link your ORCID account to Sage’s Policy Profiles to discover the government ministries and international bodies that have been citing your work;
    • Summarize media mentions of your work or big, important stories in news media, e.g. magazine covers or features in national newspapers (e.g. “In August 2025, this work was featured in The New York Times (URL)”);
    • Name awards you’ve won for your outputs or those won by trainees you supervised on the project, including a description of why the award-giving organization selected your or your trainee’s work;
    • Identify lists of top papers in which your article appears (e.g., most cited or most viewed in that journal in the year it was published); or,
    • Explain the scholarly responses to your work, e.g., conference panels discussing one of your papers or quotations from reviews of your book in important journals.

    Closing Paragraphs—Summary

    If you’re in a traditional research institution—one that would rarely be described by other academics as progressive or politically radical—then it may be advantageous for you to conclude your research statement with three summary paragraphs.

    The first would summarize your total career publications and your publications since appointment, highlighting any that received awards or nominations or that are notable for the number of citations or the critical response they have elicited. This paragraph should also describe, if your numbers are impressive, your total number of career conference presentations and invited talks or keynotes as well as the number since either your appointment or your last promotion, and the total number of publications and conference presentations you’ve co-authored with your students or trainees or partners from community or patient groups.

    A second closing paragraph can summarize your total career research funding and funding received since appointment, highlighting the money you have secured as principal investigator, the money that comes from external (regional, national and international) funders, and, if relevant, the new donor funding you’ve brought in.

    A final closing paragraph can summarize your public scholarship, including numbers of media mentions, hours of interviews provided to journalists, podcast episodes featured on or produced, public lectures delivered, community-led projects facilitated, or numbers of op-eds published (and, if available, the web analytics associated with these op-eds; was your piece in The Conversation one of the top 10 most cited in that year from your institution?).

    Final Paragraph—Plans and Commitments

    Look forward with excitement. Outline the upcoming projects, described in your middle paragraphs, to which you are already committed, including funding applications that are still under review. Paint for your reader a picture of the next three to five years of your research and then the rest of your career as you progress toward achieving the overarching goal that you identified in your opening paragraph.

    While some departments and schools are advising their pretenure faculty that references to metrics aren’t necessary in research statements, I—perhaps cynically—worry that the senior administrators who review tenure dossiers after your department head will still expect to see your h-index, total number of publications, number of high-impact-factor journals published in and those almighty external dollars awarded.

    Unless you are confident that your senior administrators have abandoned conventional impact metrics, I’d encourage you to provide these numbers and your disciplinary context. I’ve seen faculty members identify, for example, the average word count of a journal article in their niche, to show that their number of publications is not low but rather is appropriate given the length of a single article. I’ve seen faculty members use data from journals like Scientometrics to show that their single-digit h-index compares to the average h-index for associate professors in their field, even though they are not yet tenured. Such context will help your reader to understand that your h-index of eight is, in fact, a high number, and should be understood as such.

    You’ll additionally receive any number of recommendations from colleagues and mentors; for those of you who don’t have trusted colleagues or mentors at your institution, I’ve collected the advice of recently tenured and promoted associate professors and full professors from a range of disciplines and institutional contexts in this free 30-page PDF.

    I imagine that most of the peers and mentors whom you consult will remind you to align with any guidelines that your institution provides. Definitely, you should do this—and you should return to those guidelines and evaluation criteria, if they exist, as you iteratively revise your draft statement based on the feedback you receive from peers. You’ll also need to know what pieces of your P&T dossier will be read by what audience—external readers, a departmental or faculty committee, senior administrators. Anyone can tell you this; every piece of writing will need to consider both audience and context.

    But my biggest takeaway is something no client of mine has ever been told by a peer, colleague or mentor: Don’t just describe what you’ve done. Instead, point to the evidence that shows that you’ve done your work well.

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