The Department of Justice said Tuesday that George Washington University was “deliberately indifferent” toward Jewish students and faculty who said they faced antisemitic harassment and had violated federal civil rights law that bars discrimination based on race and national origin.
The four-page letter signals that George Washington could be the next university in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. The DOJ sent a similar letter to the University of California, Los Angeles, late last month, and then various federal agencies froze more than $500 million in federal grants at the university. Since then, the Trump administration has demanded $1 billion from the UC system to resolve the dispute—a move the state’s governor called “extortion.”
GW was one of 10 universities that a federal task force to combat antisemitism had planned to visit and investigate. That list included UCLA and Harvard and Columbia Universities, which also have been targeted by the Trump administration.
Harmeet Dhillon, the assistant attorney general for the civil rights division, wrote in the letter that the department plans to enforce its findings unless the university agrees to a voluntary resolution agreement to address the agency’s concerns. She didn’t detail what such an agreement would entail or what enforcement might look like.
The department’s allegations largely center on how the university responded—or didn’t—to a spring 2024 encampment established to protest the war in Gaza. The university ultimately called in D.C. police to clear the demonstration after it persisted for nearly two weeks.
“The purpose of the agitators’ efforts was to frighten, intimidate, and deny Jewish, Israeli, and American-Israeli students free and unfettered access to GWU’s educational environment,” Dhillon wrote. “This is the definition of hostility and a ‘hostile environment.’”
She also wrote that university officials “took no meaningful action” in the face of at least eight complaints alleging that demonstrators at the encampment were discriminating against students because they were Jewish or Israeli.
George Washington spokesperson Shannon McClendon said in a statement that university officials were reviewing the letter.
“GW condemns antisemitism, which has absolutely no place on our campuses or in a civil and humane society,” McClendon said. “Moreover, our actions clearly demonstrate our commitment to addressing antisemitic actions and promoting an inclusive campus environment by upholding a safe, respectful, and accountable environment. We have taken appropriate action under university policy and the law to hold individuals or organizations accountable, including during the encampment, and we do not tolerate behavior that threatens our community or undermines meaningful dialogue.”
The Department of Defense now says that “consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions at the MSAs does not promote military cohesiveness, lethality, recruitment, retention, or legitimacy; national security; or any other governmental interest.”
Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Students for Fair Admissions, the organization that successfully fought to end race-conscious admissions practices, settled with two military academies that were exempted from the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that ended affirmative action, The New York Times reported.
The Supreme Court ruled two years ago that military academies could continue to practice race-conscious admissions due to “potentially distinct interests” at such institutions. SFFA then sued, arguing such practices should be struck down. But on Monday, SFFA dropped its lawsuits against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy.
As part of the agreement, the Department of Defense, which oversees military service academies, will no longer consider race and ethnicity in admissions, according to settlement details, which emphasize recruiting and promoting individuals based on merit alone. That settlement also backed away from the notion that it has an interest in a diverse office corps.
“The Department of Defense has determined, based on the military’s experience and expertise—and after reviewing the relevant evidence—that the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions at the MSAs does not promote military cohesiveness, lethality, recruitment, retention, or legitimacy; national security; or any other governmental interest,” part of the settlement between SFFA and the Department of Defense reads. “The United States no longer believes that the challenged practices are justified by a ‘compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps.’”
Additionally, if an applicant lists race or ethnicity on an application, “no one with responsibility over admissions can see, access or consider” that information prior to a decision being made.
Arizona State University ranks fourth among four-year colleges and universities in terms of total international students enrolled.
yongyuan/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Arizona State University typically welcomes over 17,900 international students to its four campuses each year, but this fall, due to a variety of complications, the university expects only 14,600 international students will attend this fall—an 18 percent drop.
If the projection holds, international students will account for 7.5 percent of ASU’s 194,000 students this fall, according to an Aug. 11 news release. In comparison, during the 2023–24 academic year, ASU hosted 18,400 international students, with a total enrollment of 183,000, or more than 10 percent.
The change is in part due a drop in master’s applications from international students, but primarily driven by challenges to visa appointments, according to a university spokesperson.
ASU’s president, Michael Crow, told Bloombergthat as of early August, 1,000 of the university’s incoming international students (a third of the new cohort of 3,313 students) were still waiting on their visas. The university is providing several pathways for students unable to make it to campus, including online programs, study abroad, starting later in the semester or enrolling in a partner institution overseas, the spokesperson said.
“We anticipate that our enrollment of international students will continue to grow throughout the year,” said Matt López, deputy vice president of academic enterprise enrollment, said in the university news release. “When students have their visa in hand, we will welcome them with open arms and the classes they need to continue their degree without delay.”
ASU has the largest share of international students in Arizona, providing $545.1 million in revenue to the state and supporting 5,279 jobs, according to data from NAFSA, the association of international educators.
ASU also ranks fourth among four-year colleges and universities in terms of total international students enrolled, according to 2023–24 OpenDoors data, behind New York University, Northeastern University and Columbia University.
In Jarek Janio’s Inside Higher Ed opinion column, “Beyond ‘Grit’ and ‘Growth Mindsets,’” Janio argues that, to promote better student learning, college instructors should ignore questions about student motivation and focus solely on changing student behavior. He focuses on two ideas from the motivation field—grit and growth mindset—as examples of “traits” that have weak associations with student learning. Instead of focusing on what goes on “inside the student’s head,” he argues we should instead focus on “what’s happening in the environment and change that instead.”
As educational psychology researchers, we are also interested in how to get students to engage in effective learning behaviors. We fully agree with—and our research supports—the idea that it is important for instructors to structure learning environments to support student learning, such as by offering opportunities for students to revise their work and providing clear, well-defined feedback. However, it is a mistake to ignore what is going on inside students’ heads. In doing so, we miss a very crucial piece of the puzzle.
Students Are Unique Individuals
As anyone who has taught a college class knows, students are not robots. There are vast differences between them. Take the example of offering your students an opportunity to revise and resubmit their work, after receiving feedback, for a higher grade. Just because you provide this opportunity does not mean that all your students will take it. Some students will enthusiastically revisit their work, dig into the feedback provided, seek additional feedback and deepen their learning. Others will half-heartedly look over the feedback and make shallow attempts to revise. Still others will not glance at the feedback at all and will not turn in a revision.
These differences are, in part, due to more stable traits that students may have, such as their conscientiousness, their perfectionism and—yes—their grit. However, these differences may also be a function of other individual differences that are less stable. Take growth mindset, for example. Those of us who study growth mindset tend to think about it as a belief rather than a trait. It is something that can change based on the context.
Imagine a student who has been told by their statistics instructor that statistics is something that anyone can learn—you just need the right strategies. Their art professor, on the other hand, has told them that you need a special, innate talent to be good at art—you either have it or you don’t. These factors can shape students’ beliefs, and in turn, their behaviors. For example, this student may be much more likely to engage in revising and resubmitting their work in their statistics class (where they have stronger growth-mindset beliefs) than their art class (where they have stronger fixed-mindset beliefs). This pattern is also true for when students feel confident about their abilities or have a desire for learning. Such students seek out help more proactively, and they engage with feedback more constructively.
Beyond Grit and Growth Mindset
Although grit and growth mindset are perhaps the most well-known (and have some legitimate weaknesses), researchers in the educational psychology and motivation fields study many other factors that impact student engagement and learning. These include students’ interests, values, goals, needs, emotions, beliefs and perceptions of the instructor and their classroom—all things that are going on inside the student’s head but that are critically important to understanding their behavior.
Theories of motivation articulate the processes through which students’ beliefs, values, needs and goals shape their engagement, behaviors and choices. Researchers have created and tested effective tools to observe, measure and assess these different factors. Decades of research have given us robust understandings of how these factors are both shaped by and interact with the environment to predict students’ behavior and learning. These aspects of the individual student matter.
The Student and the Environment Are Both Important
It is important to focus both on what is going on in students’ heads and what is going on in the environment. Instructors have the power to shape their classroom environment in different ways that can influence student behavior.
We do not disagree with the strategies Janio proposed instructors should focus on. Instead, we want to emphasize that these strategies are effective because of how they are motivationally supportive. For instance, incorporating a revision process into course assignments is based on mastery goal structures, or the environments instructors can nurture so that students focus on their improvement and growth. Normalizing failure is a growth mindset–teaching practice that helps students see the effort they put into the learning process as being something of value. Providing feedback is an important way to inform a student’s self-confidence and show them how they can be more competent in the future.
Motivation is the central mechanism through which these strategies can help students persist through learning challenges. By understanding student motivation, these teaching strategies and approaches can be fine-tuned and adapted to differently motivated students to maximize student learning. That is exactly what motivation scientists in education have been investigating for decades. Simply discarding learner motivation is dismantling the science that undergirds motivationally supportive teaching.
Concluding Thoughts
A return to behaviorism essentially disregards the last 50 years of psychological research emphasizing the important role students’ cognition, emotion and motivation plays in the classroom. It is critical to understand these psychological processes that have been rigorously tested across many studies. Students are also agentic and complex in their thinking and motivations, so a one-size-fits-all approach rarely works. By harnessing students’ motivation, instructors can better adapt their teaching approaches to match students’ interests and goals in addition to creating motivationally supportive environments that promote persistence and deeper learning. When instructors understand their students’ motivation, it can unlock the type of engagement and behaviors meaningful for learning.
Katie Muenks is an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.Carlton J. Fong is an associate professor of postsecondary student success at Texas State University.
Arizona State University ranks fourth among four-year colleges and universities in terms of total international students enrolled.
yongyuan/iStock/Getty Images Plus
This article has been revised to reflect more enrollment data provided by Arizona State University after publication to correct Inside Higher Ed’s previous analysis.
Arizona State University welcomed over 15,100 international students to its four campuses in fall 2024, but this fall, due to a variety of complications, the university expects only 14,600 international students will attend.
If the projection holds, international students will account for 7.5 percent of ASU’s 194,000 students this fall, according to an Aug. 11 news release. In comparison, during the 2023–24 academic year, ASU hosted 18,400 international students, with a total enrollment of 183,000, or more than 10 percent.
The change is in part due a drop in master’s applications from international students, but primarily driven by challenges to visa appointments, according to a university spokesperson.
“We anticipate that our enrollment of international students will continue to grow throughout the year,” said Matt López, deputy vice president of academic enterprise enrollment, said in the university news release. “When students have their visa in hand, we will welcome them with open arms and the classes they need to continue their degree without delay.”
ASU’s president, Michael Crow, told Bloombergthat as of early August, 1,000 of the university’s incoming international students (a third of the new cohort of 3,313 students) were still waiting on their visas. The university is providing several pathways for students unable to make it to campus, including online programs, study abroad, starting later in the semester or enrolling in a partner institution overseas, the spokesperson said.
ASU has the largest share of international students in Arizona, providing $545.1 million in revenue to the state and supporting 5,279 jobs, according to data from NAFSA, the association of international educators.
ASU also ranks fourth among four-year colleges and universities in terms of total international students enrolled, according to 2023–24 OpenDoors data, behind New York University, Northeastern University and Columbia University.
As generative artificial intelligence skills have become more in demand among employers, colleges and universities have expanded opportunities for students to engage with the tools.
Indiana University is no exception. It’s developed a free, online course for campus community members to gain a basic understanding of generative AI and how the tools could fit into their daily lives and work. GenAI 101 is available to anyone with a campus login and comes with a certificate of in-demand skills for people who complete it.
Survey says: Artificial intelligence tools have gained a significant foothold on college campuses, especially in teaching and learning.
A 2023 study by Wiley found over half (58 percent) of instructors say they or their students are using generative AI in their classrooms, and a similar number believe AI-based tools, virtual reality or coursework with flexible assignment types will be important in delivering their courses in three years.
Even before entering college, learners have said they’re familiar with generative AI and expect their institutions to help them develop their skills in using it. A 2024 survey found 69 percent of high school seniors planning to attend college have used generative AI tools, and 54 percent anticipate their college will engage in AI usage and education in some way. But exposure to AI is not ubiquitous; a different 2024 study of young people (ages 14 to 22) found nearly half of respondents had never used AI tools or didn’t know what the AI tools were.
AI literacy and safety concerns have presented a growing challenge as well. A February 2025 survey from Microsoft found 73 percent of individuals say spotting AI-generated images is difficult.
How it works: GenAI 101 at Indiana is free to anyone in the university community, including students, instructors and staff members at all campuses. The course is optional and has no academic credits attached, which allowed faculty designers to be flexible and creative with how content is presented.
Brian Williams, faculty chair of the Kelley School of Business’s Virtual Advanced Business Technologies Department, serves as the lead course instructor and he, alongside a team of other faculty members, identified key topics to know about generative AI. The goal is to prepare participants to engage in an AI-influenced world with practical takeaways and insights, Williams said.
The self-paced course has eight modules and 16 lessons that include short, YouTube-style video lectures. Students learn practical examples of how to use generative AI tools, including managing their schedule or planning an event, and content areas range from prompt engineering, data storytelling and fact-checking content to how to use AI ethically. In total, GenAI 101 takes approximately four to five hours to finish.
The course features an AI character, Crimson, that teaches content, and an embedded AI tutor, Crimson Jr., that can address participants’ questions as they come up.
After completing the course, participants earn a certificate they can display on their LinkedIn profile or résumé.
What’s next: The course launches Monday, Aug. 25, and the first person to take it will be IU president Pamela Whitten, according to a university press release. She’ll gain early access to the course on Friday, Aug. 15, Williams said.
Students will be auto-enrolled in GenAI 101, making it easy to access. Some faculty instructors have also said they’ll embed the content into their syllabus or curriculum, according to Williams, in part to reduce gaps in who’s engaging with generative AI resources and education.
How is your college teaching students how to use generative AI? Tell us more.
This article has been updated to correct the date in which the course will launch to the IU community, August 25.
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bill? Higher Ed Fights Back! Monday, August 18 at 7:30 PM ET / 6:30 CT / 5:30 MT / 4:30 PT
Join HELU leaders and organizers for our upcoming webinar “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bill: Higher Ed Fights Back” on Monday, August 18th at 7:30 PM ET / 6:30 CT / 5:30 MT / 4:30 PT. We’ll be joined by Sara Garcia, a policy analyst for Senator Bernie Sanders on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP). Sara will walk us through the parts of the bill that will affect higher education and discuss what’s possible in terms of pushing back. Thomas Gokey of the Debt Collective will discuss how the myriad changes to student lending will affect student borrowers and we will end with discussion and call to act in the fall with our colleagues across the country and fight back against the attacks on higher education in the United States.
Higher ed workers – staff, faculty, university healthcare workers, facilities & maintenance workers, research assistants, academic advisors, students; in short, anyone who works on a campus – must come together as a united front to defend higher education as a public good. Higher ed must be fully-funded, with living wages and job security for everyone working on campus. We must look into the next four years with courage, determination, solidarity, and long-term strategy. Register for the August 18 webinar here.
The past few years have brought a seemingly endless series of existential challenges for colleges and their leaders. Although many of the most recent challenges have been initiated by decision-makers in the nation’s capital, a sense of crisis on college campuses is nothing new. For any number of social, political and economic reasons, leadership in the world of higher education has been hard for some time, and it will probably keep getting harder.
Navigating external crises is especially challenging for midlevel campus leaders, such as department chairs and center directors. Too few of these individuals receive effective leadership training or support. And in moments of crisis, higher education’s collective failure to invest in developing strong leaders is on full display. Beyond the lack of role preparation, the very ambiguity at the heart of midlevel leadership—sandwiched between senior leaders and front-line faculty and students—makes it an inherently tough place to be.
On so many college campuses, department chair service carries limited power, authority, time and resources. As we prepare to begin a new academic year, chairs and directors may already feel exhausted or overwhelmed. In the paragraphs that follow, we offer a few general principles that may help department chairs figure out how to use their often overlooked and undercelebrated positions to support the collective well-being of their faculty, staff and students in what will most certainly be a challenging year ahead.
Accept what you cannot do (legally, morally, procedurally). Serving as a director or chair makes you a campus leader, whether or not you tend to describe yourself in those terms. And as a leader, you bear responsibility for acting in accordance with institutional policies and also for exercising good judgment in your actions and speech.
Chairs should not offer blanket assurances of safety to individuals or guarantees of legal counsel, for example. Instead, the better move might be to connect faculty and staff with identified resources and to let the experts employ their expertise. In moments of budget austerity, midlevel leaders should exercise caution in pledging financial support or informal guarantees of continued employment.
Chairs are empowered to use their full rights as private citizens—to protest, author op-eds and contact their elected representatives—but they should take care not to blur the lines between their personal activism and their official duties and position. You chair a department that includes diverse individuals who likely think and vote differently from one another. And right now, all of them need your full support for both routine and more substantive university matters. Anticipate that faculty, staff and students may look to you to set the ground rules so that all feel welcome, valued and safe in a polarized and scary world.
Exercise creative problem-solving within your domain. In a highly charged moment, chairs should use all the tools in their arsenal, strategically employing action and inaction.
Act by supporting small moments of connection, such as bringing in some baked goods or inviting a colleague who seems particularly overwhelmed to join you on a walk and talk across campus. If a faculty member in your department has lost the support of a federal grant, keep in mind that their entire research program may be in crisis. And if such a colleague is approaching a review for tenure or promotion, you may want to initiate a timely conversation about recalibrating expectations around scholarly productivity.
As for inaction, a crisis is an opportune moment to do no more than is absolutely necessary. Off-campus turmoil demands energy and attention. Do your best to help the department separate things that must be done now from the things that can wait. This may not be the time to request funds for an external speaker. Delay scheduling a faculty retreat to overhaul the long-overdue revision of the capstone class. Use the opening faculty meeting of the year to set some scaled-back, modest goals and enlist your colleagues in a pledge to keep the shared to-do list lean. (We suspect that’ll be an easy sell.)
Prioritize stability management.Ashley Goodall has argued that change, even necessary change, tends to disrupt our ability to find belonging, autonomy and meaning in our professional lives. Goodall offers the term “stability management” to describe what leaders can do for their colleagues on a daily basis, especially when everything is in flux.
Stability management begins by recognizing what works and needs to remain constant, focusing above all on preserving those things. Many faculty members may find comfort in the ordinary work of constructing class schedules, ordering textbooks, applying for travel funds, conducting faculty searches and the like. For some of your colleagues, business as usual may convey the implicit assurance that university life marches ever forward. This doesn’t mean that you should ignore or downplay the severity of a crisis; it just means that you can try to keep it in perspective.
Rituals and relationships also provide stability. If your department has a tradition of festive gatherings to mark the beginning of the academic year, now is the time to approach such gatherings with all the joy you can muster. And if your department is lacking in joyful traditions, well, that might be an opportunity for meaningful and much-needed change.
Defer to campus experts. During the pandemic, campuses mobilized their public health resources in highly visible ways, such as appointing campus physicians and researchers to policymaking task forces. Recent executive orders and policy mandates from the federal government have forced colleges to draw on a new set of experts, including international support personnel, grant managers, lawyers and financial aid counselors.
Rather than chairing high-profile committees, many of these trained professionals may work with impacted individuals in their specific, and often highly technical, unique situations. Many of these sensitive conversations are best conducted away from the limelight.
In other words, if you don’t see these efforts happening in public, extend the charitable assumption that campus resources are being mobilized to support those in need in the ways that make the most sense.
Embrace—don’t fight—the messy in-betweenness of being a department chair. The true art of midlevel leadership hinges on accepting its inherent dualities, limitations and freedoms. Department chairs may not be able to issue broad decrees, but they wield considerable influence over climate and tone. Not all problems are theirs to solve, but they can always offer sympathy and empathy. Instead of issuing top-down edicts, they can provide time and space for others to respectfully think together about hard topics.
In fraught moments, higher ed needs midlevel leaders to lean into their in-betweenness—to serve as translators, mediators and conduits between what on some campuses are warring factions. Send messages up the chain by highlighting the concerns of the most vulnerable members of the department, in case these individuals aren’t already receiving help. Make a point to show up at campus town halls and carefully read emails from central administration so you can keep your faculty informed. When you can, de-escalate hostile exchanges, quash baseless rumors and ensure no one feels overlooked or left out.
Commit to the beauty of your discipline. One of the hardest parts of leading in a crisis is not just navigating external pressures, but withstanding the slow erosion of your own spirit, which can quietly wear down even the most resilient leader. You can’t show up as the best version of your chair self to serve others if you have fallen into despair.
The recent attacks on colleges and universities have cut many of us to the core. There is no point in pretending that most of the work that happens in the academy will solve climate change, save American democracy or right centuries of injustice. Whatever benefits accrue to the world out there as a result of your teaching and scholarship will probably be indirect and difficult to measure.
Nonetheless, an academic leader can gain strength by reflecting on the ways in which their chosen discipline contributes, however indirectly, to the common good. The grunt work you do as department chair also makes it possible for students and faculty to deepen, enrich and expand their understanding of the world. Your work makes it possible for them to come ever closer to fulfilling their dreams.
Their work has meaning and value because, among other things, it embodies curiosity and an openness to new ideas. Your work may sometimes feel like an exercise in keeping the trains running on time, but you might remind yourself that, as long as the academy stays true to its core principles, the trains are heading in a worthwhile direction.
As a new academic year approaches, midlevel leaders are uniquely positioned to be a source of information, prudence, levity, focus and reassurance for the faculty, staff and students in their immediate spheres of influence. There’s plenty that we cannot begin to predict about the year to come, but we are confident that this is a year when students, faculty and staff will look to their most proximate leaders for guidance on how to keep moving forward.
Duane Coltharp is an associate professor of English at Trinity University in San Antonio. He served Trinity for 18 years as an associate vice president for academic affairs.
Lisa Jasinski is president of the Associated Colleges of the Midwest. She is the author of Stepping Away: Returning to the Faculty After Senior Academic Leadership (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
Rumors are swirling about the extent to which Harvard University will acquiesce to the Trump administration’s attempt to crush institutions of higher education. Until very recently Harvard was being publicly lauded for standing up to the government. Reports that Harvard may be willing to pay a sizable financial settlement to resolve legal accusations that it allowed antisemitism and promoted diversity policies were shocking to many. But the university’s purported resistance to government overreach already had a glaring exception—Palestine—and we as scholars who work on the subject have recently experienced it firsthand.
The Harvard Educational Review was set to release a special issue this summer focusing on education and Palestine. The topic, commissioned in early 2024, was timely in the wake of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which rights groups and other experts have concluded is a genocide, and aligned with the journal’s commitment to publishing research that tackles the most pressing issues facing education. The articles had been accepted, edited and contracted. The special issue had already been promoted at major education conferences and on the back cover of the spring issue of the HER. But suddenly, Harvard pulled the plug.
As recently reported in The Guardian, the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG), which publishes the Review, abruptly and unilaterally decided to cancel the forthcoming special issue.
We wrote one of the articles that was supposed to be published in the special issue. Our article, one of 10 slated for publication, focused on the experiences of Palestinian teachers during the Lebanese civil war. But in May, as the special issue was nearing publication, we were surprised to find out that HEPG wanted to submit the entire issue to Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel for an exceptional and last-minute “risk” review. Articles had already been through the regular publishing process and were under contract. At no point to our knowledge had any “risk”-related concerns been raised about any of them. An additional review was therefore well outside the realm of routine practice.
Alarmed by this move and the dangerous precedent of subjecting academic scholarship to vetting by university lawyers, all authors in the special issue organized and expressed unequivocal refusal to this additional review in a letter sent to HEPG.
After we expressed our refusal, HEPG went radio silent for almost a month. And then it canceled the whole issue, only then claiming that there were problems with copyediting and its internal process. But procedural claims have often been leveled to silence speech, especially when it comes to Palestine. Whatever concerns about the process, there is no justification for the cancellation of the entire special issue. HEPG’s decision is yet another example of the “Palestine exception” in action: the term used to describe how seemingly liberal institutions restrict freedom of expression when it comes to Palestine.
Given the timing of HEPG’s decision—which aligns with the Trump administration’s weaponizing of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act—this seems to be the logical outcome of a political climate that has promoted sweeping claims of antisemitism to attack student protesters and higher education institutions, including Harvard. In this climate it seems far more likely that HEPG opted for censorship over academic freedom.
Of particular concern is Harvard’s recent adoption of a problematic new definition of antisemitism. That definition, proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), has been roundly criticized by experts—and one of the authors of the definition—for equating critiques of the state of Israel with antisemitism. This conflation makes it harder to speak out against Israel’s actions and policies toward Palestinians and easier to victimize Palestinians. Harvard is not alone in this action.
Even before Israel’s latest brutal onslaught of Gaza, scholars writing and advocating for Palestinian rights confronted the limits of liberal empathy for Palestinians in the form of tenure denials, censored freedom of speech, doxing by pro-Israel groups and even death threats. But the repression of knowledge production and freedom of speech on Palestine has escalated since October 2023. U.S. universities and colleges (including Harvard) have canceled events that center Palestinian rights, attempted to censor scholarship, forcibly suppressed student protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza and beyond, and dismissed faculty over Palestine-related programming.
Still, the scrapping of this special issue marks a worrying escalation. It suggests that even those universities that are outspoken about their liberal values are ready to stifle academics’ legitimate criticism of Israeli policies and practices. Make no mistake: Anticipatory censorship of this kind is a hallmark of the governmental overreach that authoritarian regimes around the world are known for. As a growing number of higher education institutions adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, we fear we will see more and more examples of the suppression of academic freedom.
The consequences of this extend far beyond the academy. As the death toll in Gaza exceeds 60,000 and young people there face a third year without education amid ongoing bombardment, blockade and starvation, knowledge, debate and democratic action are essential to preventing the kind of horrors that are unfolding in Gaza today.
Thea Renda Abu El-Haj is a professor of education at Barnard College, Columbia University. Jo Kelcey is assistant professor of education in the Department of Psychology and Education at Lebanese American University.
Whenever I write something halfway decent (sometimes) or astoundingly dumb (often), I can count on a thoughtful response from Bob Ubell. Our conversation took place during the period when Bob published two books,Going Online(2017) and Staying Online(2021), as well as numerous articles in EdSurge, IHE, The Evollution and other publications.
Bob’s online education career goes at least back to 1999, where he was the dean of online learning at Stevens Institute of Technology. Subsequent leadership roles include vice dean of online learning at New York University Tandon School of Engineering and vice dean emeritus, online learning, at NYU Tandon.
In a profession where many of us are making things up as we go, Bob stands out for his long-term experience thinking about and leading online learning initiatives. I asked Bob if he would answer my questions about his career and the future of online learning, and he graciously agreed.
Q: According to your Wikipedia page, you have been working at the intersection of higher education, technology and publishing since you graduated from Brooklyn College in 1961. What does the next decade hold for you as you think about your contributions to our online learning community?
A: I’m not optimistic about what’s ahead, not only for digital education, but also for the nation’s wider academic enterprise. It’s impossible to answer your question in isolation without reckoning with the ugly scene now taking place in higher ed. Challenged by the federal government’s attacks, early this spring, 600 higher ed leaders warned about “unprecedented government overreach and political interference now endangering American higher education.” Since then, the present administration has continued to follow a treacherous path, destabilizing campuses across the country, targeting faculty and student academic freedom, and, in a new Supreme Court decision, ultimately dismantling the U.S. Department of Education.
In an opinion column inthis publication earlier this year, I predicted that American colleges and universities faced a terrifying cascade of autocratic moves “set by leaders in Hungary, Turkey and elsewhere … selecting college presidents, controlling faculty hiring and advancement, punishing academic dissent and imposing travel restrictions.” Many of these despotic actions have already been implemented and continue to be imposed on schools in this country.
Last month, to restore about $400 million in federal research funding, Columbia University bowed to tyrannical demands by officials. In an unprecedented agreement, Columbia will pay more than $200 million in fines for dubious accusations of antisemitic student theatrics. It also opened the gates for government intrusion in the school’s academic prerogatives in hiring, admissions and curriculum. Keeping Columbia in academic handcuffs, the deal will be overseen by an outside monitor, reporting to officials every six months.
The midcentury philosopher and cultural critic Hannah Arendt, in her masterful account of totalitarian regimes, revealed that they rely on systematic suppression of individual thought and freedom to maintain control, undermining the very purpose of universities—institutions that encourage critical thinking, open debate and intellectual autonomy, essential in a democracy. Recent power plays against Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Duke—and, just this week, UCLA—show how brutal our government can be in imposing its will.
The noted Columbia genocide scholar Marianne Hirsch, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, who teaches a class on genocide with a book by Arendt, is considering leaving Columbia following its adoption of a new definition of antisemitism, which casts criticism of Israel as hate speech, a provision in the new pact with the federal government. Hirsch fears it may force her to face official sanction for even mentioning Arendt, who criticized Israel’s founding.
“A university that treats criticism of Israel as antisemitic and threatens sanctions for those who disobey is no longer a place of open inquiry,” Hirsch told the Associated Press. “I just don’t see how I can teach about genocide in that environment.” Reactionary governments always find an innocent mark to target. In the 1950s, it was American Communists. Today, it’s pro-Palestinian faculty and students.
The downstream effects on remote learning are already being felt, with the perception overseas—following arrests of foreign students and other threats against students and scholars from abroad—that the U.S. is turning its back on international recruitment, undermining our reputation as a leading destination for higher education and potentially impacting foreign student tuition revenue, face-to-face and online. In the U.S., the demand to shut down DEI programs will surely affect the greatest number of online students—80 percent of whom work and a third [of whom] are first in their families to attend college.
On a personal note, I worry that closing the [Education Department] will cripple and may even end higher ed data collection and reporting, giving us less reliable information on the status of American college students. Over my career in higher ed, I’ve depended on federal government data, especially in supporting findings I’ve disclosed in my writing. “We’ll soon be in the dark,” I warned in a recent IHE column.
Turning to your question, asking what sort of contribution I might make to the remote learning community. Like so many others, I don’t feel my voice possesses much force against what’s happening. Nor do I feel competent to articulate what might make a difference. Academic opposition to what we face has been scattershot and largely ineffective, except for various successful legal maneuvers. More broadly, on a national scale, resistance has been disappointing, with few voices, in and out of electoral politics, with enough momentum to capture our yearning for democratic fresh air. To get us out of this nightmare, I dream that someone will rise in this desperate time to gather all of us together in an inspiring and powerful national movement against tyranny.
Q: There is a growing concern across higher education about the job market for new college graduates, as employers are increasingly utilizing AI to accomplish the work previously done by entry-level workers. What role should online learning leaders be playing at our institutions in evolving and adapting our institutions to the AI revolution?
A: Since the pandemic, it hasn’t been that easy for recent college graduates to find a job in our digital economy–even before the invasion of AI. In March, recent college grad unemployment was at 5.8 percent, the highest in the last decades, excluding the pandemic, and nearly double the rate of all workers with a college degree, now at 2.7 percent, nearly a historic low.
“For the first time in modern history, a bachelor’s degree is failing to deliver on its fundamental promise: access to professional employment,” observes a troubling report from Burning Glass, the big labor market analysis firm. “Young graduates face unemployment rates that are rising faster than any other education or age cohort, while over half of them land into jobs they didn’t need college to get. The traditional pathway from college to career is becoming less reliable.” In addition to other causes, the report singles out AI.
As with all radical technological innovations, the reception of AI is fraught with contradictory predictions on its impact. Touted by champions as an economic miracle, others fear it as a devilish intrusion, disrupting our material well-being, especially for college grads who have historically outpaced the economic success of others. In the postwar years, most American workers found middle-class manufacturing or clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new jobs are either in highly paid professional fields or low-wage service industries, a disastrous national calamity that has largely generated our present political trouble.
Sorry, but I don’t have exciting new ways to recommend to recent college grads to extricate themselves from the present dilemma, other than—not a very original idea—encourage them to enhance their knowledge gained in college classrooms with online or in-person nondegree courses in AI and other technical disciplines, giving them a leg up with attractive additional credentials.
Not being knowledgeable about AI, I reached out to Alfred Essa, an insightful colleague and author of the forthcoming Artificial Intelligence: Shaping the Future of Innovation, who advised, “Students must think of themselves as designers, creating AI-powered applications to solve problems, not just in the short-term, but over their careers, positioning themselves in industry, capable of building and changing things with AI.” Essa emphasized that his advice is not only for technically savvy students, but for others who are creative in aesthetics, humanities and other disciplines.
Essa worries that the present higher ed leadership is obsolete. “For colleges to succeed,” he urged, “they must be led by a new generation who will adopt the new AI environment.” In the meantime, for my part, higher ed needs to welcome AI as a technical innovation, in the long tradition of typewriters, calculators, computers and digital education. Once the genie is out of the bottle, you can’t stick it back in. Restrictive, retrograde rules are foolish or punishing—or both.
Q: What advice do you have for folks like me who are thinking about ways to stay active and engaged in online learning and higher education once we retire from our university administrative roles?
A: Cicero found that the way we lived in our youth prepares us for retirement. The choices we made when we were young naturally lead to the life we will live as we age. He argued that preparation for our later years is not a separate phase, but a continuation of the life we led all along. “The harvest of old age is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured,” he wrote (Cicero De Senectute, translated with an introduction and notes by Andrew P. Peabody [Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1887]).
