Tag: Events

  • Penn State Closure Plan Prompts Sharp Reactions

    Penn State Closure Plan Prompts Sharp Reactions

    As Pennsylvania State University’s Board of Trustees prepares to decide the fate of seven of its 19 Commonwealth Campuses where enrollment has collapsed over a decade, faculty, lawmakers and some board members are questioning the university’s commitment to the state and say administrators haven’t been transparent about their decision-making process.

    University administrators say the enrollment numbers alone don’t support keeping open the seven campuses slated to close. Several of those campuses have seen enrollment fall by more than 40 percent since fall 2014.

    Penn State’s Board of Trustees met last week in a private executive session but did not vote on the plan. They’re expected to do so Thursday.

    President Neeli Bendapudi has made the case for the closures, arguing such actions are necessary, as the university can no longer sustain all of its branch campuses financially amid severe enrollment declines. She proposed closing the Dubois, Fayette, Mont Alto, New Kensington, Shenango, Wilkes-Barre and York campuses. Those campuses enroll almost 3,200 students altogether, the largest of which is Penn State York with 703 students last fall. The smallest is Shenango, which enrolled 309 students in fall 2024.

    Now, as the proposal nears the finish line, its fate is up the air and Bendapudi is facing concerns about the process of reaching the seven names.

    A ‘Difficult But Necessary’ Plan

    University leadership began drawing up those plans in February after a difficult year for higher education across the Keystone State. Four universities in the state shut down (or ended degree programs, as in the case of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) in 2024. The closures were mostly brought on by enrollment challenges, though some were dogged by concerns about fiscal mismanagement.

    University administrators spent the last several months reviewing 12 campuses for possible closure before the list of seven leaked to media outlets last week.

    Officials in a 143-page document cast the plan as “difficult but necessary decisions to ensure its long-term sustainability, allowing for continued investment in student success and dynamic learning environments for years to come” amid plunging enrollment and broad demographic challenges.

    Officials argued that the seven campuses identified for closure “face overlapping challenges, including enrollment and financial decline, low housing occupancy, and significant maintenance backlog.” They added that “projected low enrollments pose challenges for creating the kind of robust on-campus student experience that is consistent with the Penn State brand” and would require significant investments, including $200 million for facilities alone.

    “I believe the recommendation balances our need to adapt to the changing needs of Pennsylvania with compassion for those these decisions affect, both within Penn State and across the commonwealth,” Bendapudi said in a statement when the plan was released.

    She added that there is a two-year timeline for closing campuses, so they wouldn’t shut down until the end of the spring 2027 semester.

    Now the plan heads to the 36-member Board of Trustees. However, some trustees have openly expressed their opposition to the proposal.

    Jay Paterno is one of several board members who have pushed back on the plan, writing an op-ed last month with four other trustees that argued Penn State should explore other options.

    In an interview with Inside Higher Ed, Paterno criticized the proposal as rushed.

    “We’ve been presented with two options. One is the status quo, which everybody knows is not viable and is kind of a straw man. The other option is to close all seven campuses,” he said.

    Given that the costs of operating those campuses comprise “less than half of 1 percent of our budget,” Paterno said the board should take more time to explore solutions. He argues that the university has not tried to leverage fundraising to support struggling Commonwealth Campuses and that the administration should slow the process down and reach out to potential donors.

    “We’d rather be a year late than a day early,” Paterno said.

    He also noted the decision to close campuses is not Penn State’s alone. The university is state-affiliated but not state-owned, which gives it a greater degree of autonomy than fully public institutions. But since the university receives some public funds, it must submit plans to close campuses to the Pennsylvania secretary of education, who must then approve the proposal.

    ‘A Betrayal’

    Faculty have concerns about job losses, what will become of rural student populations and an alleged lack of transparency in the closure process.

    One faculty member at Penn State Wilkes-Barre, speaking anonymously due to concerns about retribution, noted, “While most faculty saw this coming, it was heartbreaking to see it in writing.”

    They questioned Penn State’s support for its Commonwealth Campuses, arguing that “the decision to decrease funding” to those locations that serve in-state students sends a strong message about where Penn State places its priorities” while it invests heavily in its main campus. They also pointed to renovations at Beaver Stadium projected to cost $700 million.

    (That project is believed to be the most expensive renovation in the history of college athletics.)

    “The lack of shared governance, transparency, and respect for contributions of faculty to Penn State University makes it easy to see why unionization efforts among faculty are needed,” they wrote, highlighting ongoing efforts by the Penn State Faculty Alliance and SEIU 668 to unionize.

    Some state politicians have also panned the plan.

    State Senator Michele Brooks, a Republican who represents a district that includes the Shenango campus, told Inside Higher Ed in an emailed statement that she recently met with trustees, who conveyed to her and others “that they feel this has been a deeply flawed process.”

    She urged Penn State’s administration and governing board to re-evaluate the decision and to work “with communities on innovative ways to reinvest in these campuses and help them grow.”

    Republican state representative Charity Grimm Krupa, who serves a district that includes the Fayette campus slated for closure, accused Penn State of betraying its mission in a fiery statement.

    “Shutting down the Fayette campus isn’t about financial responsibility; it’s about walking away from the very students Penn State was created to serve,” Grimm Krupa said last week. “It’s a betrayal of the university’s land-grant mission and a slap in the face of rural communities. Abandoning this campus sends a clear message: if you’re not from a wealthy or urban area, Penn State doesn’t see you as worth the investment. That’s disgraceful, and I urge every trustee to vote no against these closures.”

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  • Defense Department Caps Universities’ Indirect Cost Rates

    Defense Department Caps Universities’ Indirect Cost Rates

    The Department of Defense is planning to cap indirect cost reimbursement rates for higher education institutions at 15 percent, according to a May 14 memo signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. 

    “The Department of Defense (DoD) is the steward of the most critical budget in the Federal Government—the budget that defends our Nation, equips our warfighters, and secures our future. That stewardship demands discipline. It demands accountability. And it demands that we say no to waste,” wrote Hegseth.

    The memo directs the DOD to develop the new policy within 21 days, marking the fourth federal agency—including the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation—that has enacted a plan to cap indirect cost rates at 15 percent. For decades, universities have negotiated with the federal government to calculate bespoke indirect cost reimbursement rates to pay for research costs that support multiple grant-funded projects, such as facilities maintenance, specialized equipment and administrative personnel. (The paragraph has been updated.)

    Universities and their trade associations have already sued the NIH, DOE and NSF over these plans, arguing that capping indirect costs would hurt research production and compromise global competitiveness, all while violating multiple aspects of the Administrative Procedure Act, including bypassing congressional authority required to alter indirect cost rates. So far, federal judges have blocked indirect cost caps from taking effect at the NIH and DOE. The NSF agreed to pause the cap until June 13 in order to proceed to summary judgment, which is a way to resolve the case quickly without a full trial.

    Matt Owens, president of COGR, which represents research institutions, condemned the DOD’s newly announced plan. 

    “DOD research performed by universities is a force multiplier and has helped to make the U.S. military the most effective in the world. From GPS, stealth technology, advanced body armor, to precision guided missiles and night vision technology, university-based DOD research makes our military stronger,” Owens said in a statement. “A cut to DOD indirect cost reimbursements is a cut to national security. Less funding for research means less security for our nation.”

    Hegseth’s memo claimed that capping the Defense Department’s indirect cost rate for universities would “save up to $900 [million] per year on a go-forward basis,” while also claiming that the department’s “objective is not only to save money, but to repurpose those funds—toward applied innovation, operational capability, and strategic deterrence.” The NIH has also made similarly incompatible assertions. It touted on social media its indirect rate cap plan’s potential to save taxpayers more than $4 billion, while a lawyer for the NIH told a federal judge that the cut was simply a reallocation of funds. 

    The Defense Department’s plans “will not stop at new grants,” Hegseth wrote, adding that “meaningful savings can also be achieved by revisiting the terms of existing awards to institutions of higher education.” The memo directed the under secretary of defense for research and engineering to do the following within 30 days:

    • Initiate a departmentwide effort to renegotiate indirect cost rates on existing financial assistance awards to institutions of higher education. “Wherever cooperative, bilateral modification is possible, it shall be pursued.”
    • “Where bilateral agreement is not achieved, identify and recommend lawful paths to terminate and reissue the award under revised terms.”
    • “Complete renegotiations or terminations for all contracts by 180 days from the date of this memorandum.”

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  • How I Lost Faith in My University’s Mission (opinion)

    How I Lost Faith in My University’s Mission (opinion)

    I am currently chair of the philosophy department at the University of Utah. I have taught at “the U” for 32 years. We are a flagship but not an elite university; we admit 89 percent of applicants. Our students range from quite unprepared to extremely capable. For the most part, I have loved my job and have put my heart and soul into it. I have always been proud to be on this faculty helping students at all levels of academic readiness acquire skills in reading, writing, speaking and reasoning that enhance their lives and prepare them for virtually any job. But recently, my pride has evaporated and been replaced with feelings of grief and shame.

    This year—my first as chair—has seen profound upheaval. In January 2024, shortly before my term began, the State Legislature passed an anti-DEI bill, prohibiting, among other things, offices and programs related to diversity, equity or inclusion. Administrators were required to purge these three words from university websites and other documents, such as RPT—retention, promotion and tenure review—guidelines, and the university administration interpreted the law as requiring that the Women’s Resource Center, the Black Cultural Center and the LGBT Resource Center be shuttered.

    The state has also imposed a “bathroom bill” requiring trans university students to use locker rooms aligning with their sex assigned at birth, has banned Pride flags in public spaces (and in faculty offices if they can be seen through a window), and now requires faculty to post their syllabi in a publicly searchable database. It also prohibits university presidents from taking a stand on any issue that does not bear upon the “mission, role or pedagogical objectives” of the institution. And finally, as the coup de grâce for academic freedom and faculty expertise, it has funded and established the Center for Civic Excellence at Utah State University, mandating that all students take general education courses on the topics of Western civilization and the rise of Christianity. The law establishing the center identifies it as a pilot program to be rolled out to other Utah universities in the future.

    Then there is the state of Utah’s version of the national campaign against alleged “waste, fraud and abuse.” Recently passed laws dictate the process by which all post-tenure reviews of faculty must be conducted, curtail shared governance and cut state funds to all Utah public institutions by 10 percent ($60.5 million). Universities can have the funds “reallocated” if they use them for high-demand, high-wage majors. As a result, we lost our History and Philosophy of Science major, which drew some of our best students, many of them double majoring in STEM subjects and working toward careers in medicine and public health. To be clear, eliminating this major will reduce opportunities for students while producing no savings whatsoever; offering it requires no additional staff, advisers or courses beyond what is already in place for our philosophy major. These funding cuts also mean that tenure-line faculty in my department will receive a zero percent raise this year.

    In addition to the state’s actions, the upper administration—in seeming alignment with Facebook’s motto of “move fast and break things”—has instituted so many changes in such a short time it is hard to keep track. It abruptly revamped the advising system, brought four colleges under the umbrella of a Colleges and Schools of Liberal Arts and Sciences in a “shared services” arrangement, and keeps rolling out new “student success initiatives.” Whether these changes are wise or not, the pace at which they were made imposed a crushing amount of (mostly stultifying) work on deans and department chairs. Aside from refereeing a few manuscripts for journals, I have not read a piece of philosophy since I became chair, much less written one. In the midst of this, the dean of my college, a strong supporter of philosophy, resigned in the middle of the fall semester and was replaced by someone from outside our college, essentially putting us in receivership.

    While all this is happening, my youngest child, who is queer, is deciding where to attend college. He applied to the University of Utah, where he was admitted to the Honors College and received a scholarship. But how can I send him here? I fear for his safety no matter where he lives in our current hate-filled political climate, but still I hesitate to subject him to the environment on my own campus. I will likely incur a hefty bill, then, so he can attend a university out of state.

    I had more or less come to terms with this constraint, and was also managing to persevere in my job, when something happened that finally took the wind out of my sails: The president of the university announced, to the surprise of faculty, that returned missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints will be eligible to receive up to 12 college credits for their service to the church.

    I am galled by what all this says about who matters at my university. While students like my child can’t even have a designated room on campus to hang out in with like-minded others—and while the main symbol reminding us of the existence and dignity of students like him is banned from public spaces—returned LDS missionaries, who have an entire institute across from campus dedicated to their spiritual support, can get a full semester of credit, at a greatly reduced cost, essentially for going door to door trying to persuade people to join their church. This set of priorities is so wrong-headed that it verges, for me, on surreal. And yet the administration sees no irony or hypocrisy in naming its Office of Student Experience “U Belong.”

    Soon I will be hosting a retirement party for a wonderful colleague who joined the faculty one year before I did. In another era, I would have been sad to see him go but glad to be continuing in what I regard as my vocation. Now I feel nothing but envy. It is time for me, too, to retire, but, alas, that is not an option, because I have four years of out-of-state tuition to pay.

    Cynthia Stark is a professor and chair of the philosophy department at the University of Utah.

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  • A Primer on Commercialization Postdocs (opinion)

    A Primer on Commercialization Postdocs (opinion)

    When you finish a Ph.D., it often feels like you’re standing at a professional fork in the road: stay in academia or go into industry. But what if the real opportunity lies not on either of those well-worn paths, but at their intersection?

    That’s where commercialization postdoctoral programs come in—an option many early-career researchers don’t know exists but for which you may be ideally suited.

    These programs provide the tools to turn your research into real-world impact. They explore how discoveries made in the lab can become products, services or systems that solve real problems. And they teach you how to think like an entrepreneur, even if you don’t plan to start your own company, which many postdocs find helps them become more competitive for faculty and industry roles.

    If you’re curious about how your work could make a broader impact or simply what technology transfer, commercialization or innovation looks like from inside the university, this is your invitation to learn more.

    What Are Commercialization Postdocs?

    At a basic level, commercialization postdoc programs support Ph.D.s learning how to move research from discovery to application. These programs fall into two general categories:

    1. Technology transfer fellowships train you to manage intellectual property (IP), evaluate market potential and support licensing processes.
    2. Entrepreneurial and IP commercialization fellowships let you work hands-on with university-owned (or your own) innovations to develop them for real-world use.

    Both paths expand your skill set well beyond most traditional academic training and do so in a way that positions you to lead innovation in any field or sector.

    Why This Training Matters

    Here’s a truth we don’t talk about enough—Ph.D.s are already practicing innovation.

    You’re trained to identify gaps, solve problems and produce new knowledge. Commercialization programs help you understand how to apply those same skills in ways that create value beyond the lab or scholarly community.

    Even if you don’t see yourself launching a start-up, learning to assess market needs, build relationships across disciplines and effectively communicate your research vision and unique value proposition can open doors to new kinds of funding, partnerships and diverse career prospects.

    From Mindset to Practice: A Case Study in Entrepreneurial Thinking

    In spring 2024, Virginia Tech worked with Archer Career to develop a program focused on helping postdocs adopt an entrepreneurial mindset. Through online modules and a full-day, in-person workshop, 19 postdocs from across multiple disciplines engaged in activities including:

    • Crafting elevator pitches
    • Identifying the innovative aspects of their research
    • Mapping and mobilizing their personal and professional networks

    Those that attended the program said they felt it filled a gap in their knowledge and appreciated hearing from current Ph.D. entrepreneurs and connecting with peers. They also realized they weren’t alone in their questions about research commercialization and start-up company creation, and that there was space for conversations about innovation that didn’t require giving up their scholarly identities. This event also demonstrated the need for more discussions about the value of an entrepreneurial mindset among academics.

    Where Commercialization Postdoc Programs Live

    While commercialization postdoc programs are still emerging, there’s a growing list of opportunities across the U.S. that support Ph.D.s building critical technology transfer and entrepreneurial skills.

    Technology Transfer-Focused Programs

    Entrepreneurial and Start-up–Oriented Programs

    • Innovation Commercialization Fellows Program—Carnegie Mellon University: Current graduate and Ph.D. students, postdocs and research assistants at Carnegie Mellon apply to work on a start-up based on university research with a faculty member.
    • ASPIRE to Innovate Postdoctoral Fellowship Program—Vanderbilt University: Current Ph.D. students studying biomedical sciences and postdocs affiliated with Vanderbilt School of Medicine apply to receive mentorship, training and networking opportunities to learn how to launch a company and to commercialize technologies discovered at Vanderbilt.
    • Postdoctoral Entrepreneurship Program—University of Washington: This program gives strong preference to UW postdoctoral researchers or graduating Ph.D. students. It funds “commercially focused individuals” to work in UW labs on translational experiments to identify and obtain funding and to develop a business model.
    • Presidential Postdoctoral Innovation Fellowship Program—Virginia Tech: This fellowship provides up to two years of support for Ph.D.s working to commercialize Virginia Tech intellectual property alongside a faculty mentor at the university.
    • Ignite Fellow for New Ventures Program—Cornell University: The program aims to build new businesses, “grow entrepreneur scientists and engineers,” and “enrich Cornell’s venture ecosystem.” The program is open to graduating Ph.D.s or master’s students working with a faculty inventor to commercialize technology developed on a Cornell campus.
    • Activate Fellowship: This program provides two years of support, including “funding, technical resources, and unparalleled support from a network of scientists, engineers, investors, commercial partners, and fellow entrepreneurs.” The program accepts applications in the fall of each year, with the fellowship beginning in early summer the following year. Prospective fellows can apply to work in their local ecosystem or in hubs located across the U.S.:
    • Runway Startup Postdoc Program—Cornell Tech: “Part business school, part research institution, and part startup incubator,” Runway is focused on digital technologies, and Startup Postdocs are provided with training, mentorship and other resources to support their growth as entrepreneurs. Startup Postdocs arrive with ideas that require time and specialized guidance to develop. The program accepts candidates from anywhere around the world.

    Each of these programs offers something slightly different, but they share a common goal—to empower researchers to think beyond the bench and take an active role in translating ideas into action. The Activate Fellows and Runway program at Cornell Tech are especially unique, as they allow a Ph.D. to bring their own ideas with them. The Runway program, which to date has trained 55 postdocs, has also been featured in The Journal of Technology Transfer.

    One advantage of participating in a commercialization-focused postdoc program is the access to resources that support your growth. Many programs are embedded in innovation ecosystems, such as tech transfer offices, legal support, start-up incubators and translational research centers. Some even offer seed funding or business mentorship to help you move a technology forward.

    What’s Next? A Call to Action

    If you’re a postdoc or advising one, you don’t need to have a ready-to-pitch product to benefit from this kind of training. You just need to be curious.

    Ask yourself:

    • What problems does my research help solve?
    • Who beyond my field might care about this work?
    • What skills could help me turn this into something people can use?
    • What resources are available to me to learn more about commercializing research and entrepreneurship?

    Whether you want to start a company, work at the intersection of science and policy, or simply make your research more impactful, commercialization training can help you get there.

    We also need to do more, collectively, to bring visibility to commercialization programs available to Ph.D.s. This includes:

    Most importantly, we need to keep reminding ourselves and our colleagues that commercialization and entrepreneurship isn’t a detour: It’s a destination that many Ph.D.s are uniquely equipped to reach.

    Final Thoughts

    You don’t need to have a CEO title in your sights to benefit from entrepreneurial thinking. At its core, commercialization is about connecting your work to the world, and that’s something every researcher and scholar should know how to do. Whether through a fellowship, a campus workshop or self-guided exploration, now is a great time to start learning how your research can make a difference in the world.

    And who knows? You might just discover that innovation is your next career frontier.

    Chris Smith is Virginia Tech’s postdoctoral affairs program administrator. He serves on the National Postdoctoral Association’s Board of Directors and is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing a national voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

    Tomer Joshua serves as associate director of the Runway Startup and Spinouts programs at Cornell Tech and the Jacobs Technion–Cornell Institute, where he supports deep tech and digital start-ups.

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  • Chat Bot Passes College Engineering Class With Minimal Effort

    Chat Bot Passes College Engineering Class With Minimal Effort

    Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, instructors have worried about how students might circumvent learning by utilizing the chat bot to complete homework and other assignments. Over the years, the large language model has enabled AI to expand its database and its ability to answer more complex questions, but can it replace a student’s efforts entirely?

    Graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s college of engineering integrated a large language model into an undergraduate aerospace engineering course to evaluate its performance compared to the average student’s work.

    The researchers, Gokul Puthumanaillam and Melkior Ornik, found that ChatGPT earned a passing grade in the course without much prompt engineering, but the chat bot didn’t demonstrate understanding or comprehension of high-level concepts. Their work illustrating its capabilities and limitations was published on the open-access platform arXiv, operated by Cornell Tech.

    The background: LLMs can tackle a variety of tasks, including creative writing and technical analysis, prompting concerns over students’ academic integrity in higher education.

    A significant number of students admit to using generative artificial intelligence to complete their course assignments (and professors admit to using generative AI to give feedback, create course materials and grade academic work). According to a 2024 survey from Wiley, most students say it’s become easier to cheat, thanks to AI.

    Researchers sought to understand how a student investing minimal effort would perform in a course by offloading work to ChatGPT.

    The evaluated class, Aerospace Control Systems, which was offered in fall 2024, is a required junior-level course for aerospace engineering students. During the term, students submit approximately 115 deliverables, including homework problems, two midterm exams and three programming projects.

    “The course structure emphasizes progressive complexity in both theoretical understanding and practical application,” the research authors wrote in their paper.

    They copied and pasted questions or uploaded screenshots of questions into a free version of the chat bot without additional guidance, mimicking a student who is investing minimal time in their coursework.

    The results: At the end of the term, ChatGPT achieved a B grade (82.2 percent), slightly below the class average of 85 percent. But it didn’t excel at all assignment types.

    On practice problems, the LLM earned a 90.4 percent average (compared to the class average of 91.4 percent), performing the best on multiple-choice questions. ChatGPT received a higher exam average (89.7 percent) compared to the class (84.8 percent), but it faltered much more on the written sections than on the autograded components.

    ChatGPT demonstrated its worst performance in programming projects. While it had sound mathematical reasoning to theoretical questions, the model’s explanation was rigid and template-like, not adapting to the specific nuances of the problem, researchers wrote. It also created inefficient or overly complex solutions to programming, lacking “the optimization and robustness of considerations that characterize high-quality student submissions,” according to the article.

    The findings demonstrate that AI is capable of passing a rigorous undergraduate course, but that LLM systems can only accomplish pattern recognition rather than deep understanding. The results also indicated to researchers that well-designed coursework can evaluate students’ capabilities in engineering.

    So what? Based on their findings, researchers recommend faculty members integrate project work and open-ended design challenges to evaluate students’ understanding and technical capabilities, particularly in synthesizing information and making practical judgements.

    In the same vein, they suggested that faculty should design questions that evaluate human expertise by requiring students to explain their rationale or justify their response, rather than just arrive at the correct answer.

    ChatGPT was also unable to grasp system integration, robustness and optimization over basic implementation, so focusing on these requirements would provide better evaluation metrics.

    Researchers also noted that because ChatGPT is capable of answering practice problems, instruction should focus less on routine technical work and more on higher-level engineering concepts and problem-solving skills. “The challenge ahead lies not in preventing AI use, but in developing educational approaches that leverage these tools while continuing to cultivate genuine engineering expertise,” researchers wrote.

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  • What’s in House Republicans’ Risk-Sharing Plan?

    What’s in House Republicans’ Risk-Sharing Plan?

    Under a new accountability measure recently proposed as part of a larger House budget bill, colleges would have to pay millions of dollars each year to reimburse the government for their students’ unpaid loans.

    The plan builds on an idea—known as risk-sharing—that lawmakers and policy analysts have been toying with since at least 2015. As the federal student loan portfolio grew, the goal was to require colleges to have some skin in the game and incentivize them to improve student outcomes.

    And while the concept has gained some bipartisan support in theory, higher education institutions have repeatedly argued that it is difficult to create a fair accountability system when many of the variables involved are out of an institution’s control and depend on the decisions of individual students and borrowers.

    So far, the higher ed lobby has successfully defeated proposed risk-sharing plans such as the one included in a Republican bill from the last Congress, known as the College Cost Reduction Act. But now, an almost identical proposal is back and at the heart of House Republicans’ plan to cut at least $330 billion from higher education programs over the next 10 years. The overall legislation, which aims to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget, could receive a vote on the House floor this week, though some lawmakers have threatened to block the measure amid concerns that it doesn’t include deeper cuts. Even if the bill fails, it serves as a marker of what House Republicans hope to accomplish moving forward.

    Many higher education policy experts warn that practically speaking, the latest risk-sharing plan relies on a complicated formula that’s essentially a black box. Released in late April, the proposal has not been tested enough to know its ramifications, they say, and the limited data available is inconclusive. Some analyses released by conservative groups say the program will be a financial boost for efficient public institutions and penalize bloated private ones. But one study conducted by a lobbying group suggests that public regional and minority-serving institutions that serve high populations of low-income students will get hit the hardest.

    “Fundamentally it’s an astonishing level of federal overreach to essentially lump in all institutions of higher education together—public, private, for-profit—and run a convoluted formula to determine winners and losers at the federal level and then redistribute funding,” said Craig Lindwarm, senior vice president of government affairs for the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities.

    Democratic politicians also argue that the purpose of the legislation is not truly to hold colleges accountable for student outcomes like graduation rates and income levels, but to crack down on what the government considers overly liberal institutions and fund President Donald Trump’s priorities.

    Even some conservative supporters acknowledge that it’s difficult to know the full scope of the bill’s potential impact this early. But they say risk-sharing is a necessary tool to penalize colleges that provide a poor return on investment and ensure the production of a well-prepared, financially stable workforce. They also suggest that the incentives such as additional grant funding to institutions that keep costs low and graduation rates high will offset the penalty for most public institutions.

    “With any policy change, we’re not going to be able to predict in advance 100 percent of how this is going to affect everyone, everywhere, all the time. But I don’t think that should be an excuse to not make policy changes,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. “I still think the data we have gives us a general idea of which sorts of institutions would be affected and the magnitudes of the penalties involved.”

    So How Does It Work?

    The proposed risk-sharing plan would kick in for new loans starting in July 2027, said an aide for Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee. That means colleges wouldn’t be penalized for disruptions to the student loan system that occurred during the pandemic or efforts during the Biden and Trump administrations to overhaul repayment.

    If we don’t even understand how this works, why the heck are we passing it? I mean, it’s a concept, but I don’t think it’s the concept that people think it is.”

    Jason Delisle, nonresident senior fellow at the Urban Institute

    And because borrowers don’t have to start paying back their loans until six months after they graduate or stop out, institutions likely won’t have to pay a penalty until 2029 or 2030 at the earliest, the aide added.

    But from then on, institutional payments would be calculated annually—major by major—for each new cohort of borrowers and would continue until they’ve paid off their loans. The amount per cohort could change from year to year, depending on factors such as borrower behavior, postgraduation earnings and college costs. But it’s expected to grow as more and more cohorts are added to the lump sum.

    Under the bill, the amount per cohort would be calculated using a three-part formula, which is largely unchanged from what Republicans proposed last Congress in the CCRA.

    The first step is to determine a college’s risk-sharing liability, which is how much each institution owes the government. To do that, the formula looks at the difference between how much students were supposed to repay during a given year and how much they actually did. The calculation takes into account the value of any missed or partial payments as well as any interest that the government waived or principal contributions it matched, the committee aide said. It does not, however, include debt waived through programs like Public Service Loan Forgiveness, which was a concern for institutions.

    This is the part of the formula that raises the most questions for institutions, as the mechanics of exactly how the risk-sharing liability is calculated are not clearly outlined in the legislation or in a CCRA database published by the education committee Republicans in 2024. And even if it were, much of the data needed to run the formula is not publicly accessible.

    “How the formula works is the million-dollar question, and something that we’ve been trying to work on for a year and a half,” one policy expert said. “It’s very complicated and relies on metrics that aren’t publicly available.”

    House committee aides counter that colleges have access to student borrower data via the National Student Loan Data System, which can be used to predict future risk-sharing payments. They also point to a recent Dear Colleague letter reminding colleges of their responsibility to monitor borrower payments.

    But even then, higher ed lobbyists say, it’s not clear who will be responsible for calculating the liability. If any part of that responsibility falls to campus financial aid administrators, higher ed groups say the plan will increase the administrative burden on colleges.

    “If I were a lobbyist, I would just say to all of my members, go to your congressman and say, ‘We don’t know what this does,’” said Jason Delisle, a policy analyst who has worked at think tanks across the political spectrum but is now based at Urban Institute where he’s a nonresident senior fellow. “If we don’t even understand how this works, why the heck are we passing it? I mean, it’s a concept, but I don’t think it’s the concept that people think it is.”

    Incentives to Lower Costs

    Once that risk-sharing liability is known, the next step in the formula is to figure out how much of that liability fee a college will have to pay. That’s done using what the legislation calls an earning-price ratio, which compares students’ earnings to the federal poverty line and college cost. A higher EPR means a lower final payment. For example, if an institution’s EPR is 0.3, or 30 percent, then it has to pay 70 percent of the original liability.

    To further offset the risk-sharing penalty, colleges can also qualify for a new pot of funding proposed in the bill called the PROMISE Grant, which is the third step of the formula. How much a college would get in PROMISE funding depends on the total value of Pell Grants received and the graduation rate of Pell-eligible students. This grant is funded by other colleges’ risk-sharing payments.

    Rep. Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee, is leading the effort to cut billions from higher education programs.

    Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

    So, according to data from the House committee, the State Technical College of Missouri should get $3,230,130.50 in PROMISE grants. But the community college would have to pay $9,688, bringing its net gain down to $3,220,442.50. Washington University in St. Louis, however, would receive no PROMISE Grant funding and lose about $3.5 million. (The House Committee data only lists the final risk-sharing payment—not original liability values or EPRs.)

    In theory, this data demonstrates how the EPR and the PROMISE Grant are supposed to support colleges that serve low-income students, but many higher ed lobbyists are worried the program will actually do the opposite. That’s largely because colleges can only receive a PROMISE Grant if they agree to lock in tuition rates for each new freshman class. If they can keep tuition costs low, then their EPR scores will only be strong. Some lobbyists say that neither is a feasible option for public colleges and minority-serving institutions, which rely heavily on funding from the state.

    “It’s not a coincidence that some of our schools that would get hit the hardest are in states that invest very little in public higher education. Some of our schools in Pennsylvania and Arizona, for example, would fare extremely poorly, and it’s by and large because tuition levels are such a determinative component as it relates to the penalty assessment,” said MacGregor Obergfell, director of governmental affairs at APLU. “To think of what traditional conservative orthodoxy is, it seems pretty unusual that a conservative position is using the federal government to punish state institutions for decisions made by their states.”

    Reward or Penalty?

    Some higher ed groups also noted that much of the formula either depends on or fails to acknowledge factors outside of a college’s control. Much of this has to do with unpredictable borrower behavior, but there are other factors at play, too; for example, when calculating discounts with the EPR, the formula doesn’t account for differences in the cost of living from college to college.

    “Institutions in higher-cost areas are at more of a disadvantage than other institutions,” said Karen McCarthy, vice president of public policy and federal relations for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “They have to charge higher prices to reflect higher costs of labor, maintaining facilities and all those types of things.”

    The burden of risk-sharing payments may be so high that colleges elect to opt out of the federal student loans program entirely, she added: “Ultimately it would have an impact on lower-income students who have a need both for a Pell Grant and a direct loan to help them meet their cost of attendance.”

    Of colleges that enrolled 70 percent or more low-income, Pell-eligible students, 96 percent would have to pay a risk-sharing penalty and 91 percent would lose money over all when PROMISE Grant is factored in, according to the American Council on Education’s analysis of the House data.

    The committee countered that finding with its own analysis of the data, sent to Inside Higher Ed, showing how colleges that enroll the highest share of low-income students should see about $99 more per student, while those that enroll the lowest share would lose about $66 per student.

    The ACE analysis as well as the committee’s data are among the few studies that show the estimated impact of the previously proposed risk-sharing plan. None have been updated yet to reflect the latest iteration.

    Another analysis from Cooper, the AEI fellow, estimated that public institutions as a whole should get more money under the plan, but private nonprofits are expected to face a substantial penalty.

    Although critics point to how the plan would affect individual institutions, particularly small, underresourced schools, proponents argue that the focus should be on the impact to higher education over all, and that colleges can lower their costs to see a payoff.

    “Because the net gains are significantly larger, the sector as a whole sees a net gain even though more institutions have net losses,” Cooper said. “So, the upside for institutions here is that there are significant rewards available to those which can improve their outcomes.”

    At the end of the day, it’s all about how you choose to look at the data.

    “I would just like to see [the formula of risk-sharing] play out for a couple of hypothetical colleges based on data that has some bearing on reality,” said Delisle from Urban Institute. “And that’s a hard thing to come by right now.”

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  • Florida A&M Hires DeSantis Ally as President

    Florida A&M Hires DeSantis Ally as President

    Florida A&M’s Board of Trustees voted 8 to 4 Friday to hire Marva Johnson as president.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Jemal Countess/Getty Images for NOBCO | JHVEPhoto/iStock/Getty Images

    Following a contentious selection process, Florida A&M University hired a new president with no experience working in higher education but long-standing ties to Republican governor Ron DeSantis.

    Marva Johnson, a lobbyist for Charter Communications, faced sharp opposition from students and alumni, who dubbed her “MAGA Marva.” But despite questions about her lack of experience, Florida A&M’s board voted 8 to 4 in a Friday meeting to make her the next president.

    Johnson was also criticized by community members and board chair Kristin Harper for her salary demands, which included base pay of $750,000 plus performance bonuses. (Two other candidates requested compensation in the $500,000 range, while one other was negotiable.)

    Harper was one of the four trustees who voted against hiring Johnson.

    “In an age of merit-based hiring decisions, how can one justify settling for a candidate who does not meet all of the position criteria? Or turning a blind eye to exceptionally qualified candidates?” Harper asked.

    She added that FAMU community members “have been very clear” with their feedback.

    But other trustees emphasized Johnson’s experience in the political world. Jamal Brown, the Faculty Senate president, who sits on the board, argued that FAMU needed a president who has “access and political connections” to ensure the university’s financial success. In voting for Johnson, he argued that “this moment calls for someone who understands the systems that fund and govern us, because right now our survival depends on how we navigate those systems.”

    While Johnson has never worked in higher education in any capacity, she spent eight years on the Florida State Board of Education, including time as chair. During the hiring process, critics highlighted her lack of experience, as did some trustees who voted against her.

    Johnson beat out Donald Palm, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Florida A&M, who received four votes. Other candidates included Rondall Allen, provost and vice president for academic affairs at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, and Gerald Hector, senior vice president for administration and finance at the University of Central Florida.

    Palm, the internal candidate, was overwhelmingly endorsed by FAMU’s alumni association.

    At a tense meet-and-greet with Johnson on Wednesday, the candidate assured the university community she was “not a Trojan horse” and promised she “would fight and win for FAMU.”

    However, critics have argued she failed to articulate a clear vision for the university.

    Additional drama accompanied the hire when the board cut Harper out of contract negotiations. While board chairs have traditionally negotiated the contract with incoming presidents at Florida A&M, trustees voted to delegate that responsibility to another member at Friday’s meeting.

    “I take personal offense at what is happening,” Harper said during that discussion.

    Another controversy arose earlier in the search amid speculation that Johnson was added to a list of three finalists at the last minute. Last month trustee Ernie Ellison called to restart the search, arguing, “There are too many clouds hanging over this process.” He stepped down earlier this month and was quickly replaced by a new DeSantis appointee, who then voted to hire Johnson.

    Johnson steps into the FAMU job, which is currently held by an interim, after Larry Robinson, who led the university from 2017 to 2024, resigned amid controversy over a fraudulent gift.

    Last spring Florida A&M announced at commencement that the university had received a $237 million donation from Greg Gerami, a relatively unknown businessman with no connection to the institution. Florida A&M appeared to ignore warning signs that Gerami had also pledged $95 million to Coastal Carolina University in 2020, despite having no ties to CCU other than previously dating an employee. Gerami walked that donation back due to what he viewed as disrespect by officials at Coastal Carolina. Gerami’s FAMU donation was later invalidated.

    Despite the opposition to her candidacy, Johnson fits the profile favored in recent years by the governing boards at Florida’s public institutions, which have emphasized nontraditional applicants. Johnson is one of multiple presidential hires with ties to DeSantis or the GOP since 2022, when the State Legislature passed a bill allowing universities to shield applicant identities until the end of the hiring process, breaking with a long-standing tradition of making those names public. State lawmakers recently proposed injecting more transparency into searches, but that effort failed.

    Other political hires include Ben Sasse, a former Republican U.S. senator from Nebraska, who had a short-lived presidency at the University of Florida; former Florida lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez at Florida International University; and former state lawmakers Adam Hasner at Florida Atlantic University and Richard Corcoran at New College of Florida, among several others. Former GOP lawmaker Ray Rodrigues was also hired to lead the State University System of Florida in 2022.

    The University of Florida is currently in the process of replacing Sasse with an interim appointed to the job after his abrupt departure. Sole finalist Santa Ono, a traditional academic who left the University of Michigan to take the Florida job, marks a reversal of course compared to recent hires. However, Ono’s candidacy has sparked criticism from some conservative power players.

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  • ICE Warns International Students of More SEVIS Terminations

    ICE Warns International Students of More SEVIS Terminations

    Immigration officials sent letters to international students on short-term work visas Thursday night, threatening to terminate their legal status in the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System and remove them from the country. The number of affected students is still unknown, but Inside Higher Ed can confirm at least 35.

    It’s the first sign that the Trump administration is resuming its campaign to deport student visa holders, weeks after restoring the statuses of thousands of students. ICE recently released an updated policy that significantly expands the agency’s authority to terminate students’ SEVIS status and pave the way for deportation proceedings. 

    This time, they’re targeting students on Optional Practical Training visas, or OPTs, which allow international postgraduates the opportunity to work in a field relevant to their study on a short-term extension. Students on OPT are allowed a total of 90 days of unemployment every 12 months before falling out of compliance. It’s still not known whether any of the affected students were on a special visa extension known as OPT for STEM, awarded to graduates in high-demand technology, science and engineering fields. 

    One international student adviser, who spoke with Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity, said 28 of his institution’s students on OPT received the letter in the past day, and he expects that number will grow. 

    In a copy of one letter received by an international student and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, Immigration and Customs Enforcement warned those who have not reported employment status within 90 days of starting their OPT visa that they must do so in 15 days. If they don’t, the Student Exchange and Visitor Program “will set your SEVIS record to ‘terminated,’” the letter reads, which “may result in the initiation of immigration proceedings to remove you from the United States.”

    The letter is nearly identical to those sent by officials during the first Trump administration in 2020. The only difference: Back then, the Student Exchange and Visitor Program was the letter’s sole signatory. This time, ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are also named. 

    The 2020 letters were sent two years after officials issued an update to designated school officials informing them that the administration had begun a review of OPT students’ employment status to find noncompliant visa holders. But that notice also said SEVP would not automatically terminate students’ SEVIS status for going over the 90-day unemployment limit before notifying students. 

    It’s not clear whether immigration officials engaged in a review process before beginning to notify students of potential SEVIS terminations this week. Spokespeople for ICE and DHS did not respond to questions in time for publication. 

    It was also not immediately clear if OPT students’ SEVIS terminations would result in subsequent visa revocations, which are the purview of the State Department. A spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email that they “cannot preview future visa-related decisions, which are made on a case-by-case basis, based on the individual facts relevant to the case,” and deferred other questions sent by Inside Higher Ed to DHS.

    In an internal communication sent to international student advisers and support specialists, NAFSA, an organization of international educators, urged college officials to regularly check the SEVIS database for notices of OPT students’ compliance with “accrued unemployment days” and to reach out to any students who are over the 90-day limit as soon as possible. 

    Immigration officials began systematically terminating thousands of students’ SEVIS statuses along with their visas in late March, an unprecedented move that threw international student support offices into chaos and left students scrambling to avoid deportation. 

    Last month, immigration officials restored the SEVIS statuses of more than 5,000 international students after losing dozens of court cases challenging the legality of efforts to revoke foreign students’ legal residency at a breakneck pace.

    The anonymous international student adviser said students on OPT often forget to report their employment details before the 90-day deadline. Many are distracted by graduations and finals well after they receive approval for the visa and forget, he said; in other cases, the lapse can be due to technical issues within SEVIS.

    Because of that, they’re often given some leeway, and he said he’s never seen or heard of a student having their SEVIS status terminated for not reporting employment details on time, including the last time these letters were sent in 2020. Then again, much of the Trump administration’s treatment of student visa holders is unprecedented, and he’s worried this could be a real danger for them.

    “There’s a lot of panic and uncertainty as our students are waiting to see what will happen, and we’re waiting to see if they’ll really go through with it,” he said. “I think this is the real deal.”

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  • Detained Georgetown Professor Released From ICE Custody

    Detained Georgetown Professor Released From ICE Custody

    Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral fellow and professor at Georgetown University, was released from a federal detention center in Texas on Wednesday after being held for two months.

    Suri, an Indian national, was arrested in March under government claims that he was a threat to U.S. interests and had close connections to a known or suspected terrorist. This week a federal judge in Virginia ordered Suri’s immediate release due to a lack of evidence to support such claims.

    Suri is one of about a dozen foreign nationals in the U.S. targeted by the Trump administration for pro-Palestinian activism, including Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk and Momodou Taal. While Khalil remains in custody, Mahdawi was released on bail on April 30 and Öztürk was released from federal custody last week. Taal chose to leave the U.S. in April.

    Prior to his arrest, Suri had been in the U.S. for three years on a student visa and was teaching a course on minority rights in South Asia at Georgetown, according to The New York Times. Suri’s lawyers believe he was targeted because his father-in-law served as a political adviser to the Hamas-led government in Gaza in the early 2000s.

    Suri was apprehended outside his home in Rosslyn, Va., on March 15 and was moved among detention centers in Virginia, Louisiana and Texas. Suri described his treatment in the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas as subhuman, saying he was chained at the ankles, wrists and body.

    Other international academics are locked in legal battles with the federal government over challenges to their standing in the U.S.

    A University of Minnesota student, Dogukan Gunaydin, has been in ICE custody since March despite having his case overturned. Alireza Doroudi, who was a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, requested voluntary departure to avoid prolonged detention, according to his attorney. Columbia student Leqaa Kordia was arrested in March and remains in an immigration detention center in Texas.

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  • Lessons of the Fountain Pen (opinion)

    Lessons of the Fountain Pen (opinion)

    For the past two years, during the twilight of my academic career, I have become a devotee of the fountain pen, often pondering this seemingly retro act of putting pen to paper.

    Composing again by hand forced me to admit how often I succumb to the internet’s never-ending temptations. In the past, some of my best prose has come forth at 40,000 feet, while I was strapped in for a long flight—with no contact outside the streaking metal tube. But the wily digital devil never rests. Most jets now offer Wi-Fi, enticing you to check your email or the Yankees–Red Sox score as you cross the North Atlantic.

    My longing to write by hand, though, was undermined by largely illegible penmanship, a lifelong consequence of my naturally lefty self having been forced to write right-handed. No pen ever seemed to work for me, and I have tried most. Gel pens are the worst, producing a script that even I cannot decipher. Even so, during a research trip to Europe in fall 2022, where Wi-Fi was often unavailable, I found myself relying on a bound notebook during the day and my computer at night. The illegibility of my notes and journal entries made typing them out especially onerous and time-consuming, all the more so after I had returned home two months later. Then I remembered a fountain pen that my mother had gifted me so long ago—was it for my 50th birthday in 2005?—that its ink cartridges had dried up. A trip to Staples yielded a small pack, and I realized right away that there was enough friction between the nib and page to slow me down—enough for me to be able to decipher what I had written.

    Like most brainstorms, this one proved ephemeral. To write by hand and then enter text into a computer—with my mediocre keyboarding skills—was just too burdensome. Those who started their academic journeys during the typewriter era will remember with a whiff of despair those late-night, hours-long sessions spent typing the final draft. Correction tape, erasable bond, Wite-Out—my heart sinks just listing those essential tools from another era. If you want a taste of those times, just sample the acknowledgments in academic books or dissertations from the decades before computers, in which women, typically wives, are thanked for having typed the manuscript. The acknowledgements from Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, which I just pulled from a shelf, reflect more rarefied academic circumstances, as the author notes the grant provided by the English Department at Columbia University “for the typing of the manuscript.”

    And then a light went off as I sat in my study, one that has changed my life as a writer. After struggling with incipient carpal tunnel syndrome a few years ago, I purchased voice recognition software. Dragon Naturally Speaking was powerful, especially if you spoke in complete phrases and sentences. My copy of the software is now old—it will not work with Windows 11—but proved a godsend with unexpected benefits. While dictating my notebook pages, I could hear the awkward sentences; I could conjure the better word on the spot, and I could detect those places where the tone needed adjusting. Sometimes inspiration would bless me and a new sentence or two would emerge like Athena.

    I’m no neo-Luddite longing to smash all computers, even when Windows or MS Word betray me, as they so often do. I recognize the realities and benefits of our digital age. But wielding a fountain pen these past two years has prompted me to wonder whether some challenges the humanities face regarding writing and reading might be overcome by heeding the pen’s simple lessons.

    The Importance of Touch

    For millennia the act of writing has been tactile. From Babylonian cuneiform on clay tablets to elaborate Medieval script on vellum and modern calligraphy on heavyweight wedding stationery, writing has always meant touching the surface, with words being physically imprinted as the pen journeys across. When I write well, my hands seldom leave the page. And when I stop to consider the right word or a more felicitous phrase, my pen often poises a mere quarter inch above, ready to strike.

    Compare this to composing on a laptop, where pauses can lead to disaster. Distractions fill your field of vision—apps, task bars, weather forecasts and seemingly never-ending notifications that another email has arrived or another appointment looms. When you grasp for the right combination of words, it’s all too easy to seek them beyond the screen, or, even worse, to succumb to the program suggesting what it believes should come next. And unless you are vigilant about shutting off endless features, the software will insist upon indicating that you just misspelled a word or used a questionable grammatical construction. Most of us then dutifully correct the “mistake,” only to lose the rhythm and even essence of our prose. More and more, the virtual page seems to be doing the writing.

    The Value of Tangibility

    We have all had the experience of composing and revising a document on a computer only to lose the effort because of a crash, a software freeze or a moment of forgetfulness in which we clicked “no” instead of “yes.” What might have seemed so real to us for an hour or more vanishes like a genie who returns to his bottle without granting our wish.

    When I compose by hand, my efforts are right in front of me. The crossed-out word—which turns out to be the right one—can still be recovered. The history of moving paragraphs, those arrows and circles that sometimes fill the page, are not lost as they would be in computer drafting. Even more satisfyingly tangible for me, however, is the physical evidence of my labors: the blue ink stains on my right hand, the ritual of refilling my pen from the bottle when I have gushed out a pool of words, the celebratory occasion when I empty a bottle of ink and need to open a new one. A similar mood of celebration arises when I fill the last page of my wide-ruled notebook and place it on the shelf next to its predecessors. Scrolling through thousands of documents and folders on my computer is certainly a humbling experience, as they represent the literal steps in a multidecade academic journey, but I regret not having found my fountain pen niche many years before. What a collection those notebooks would’ve been.

    The Pleasures of Portability

    Coinciding with my return to compositional roots has been my regular presence at a place where my words seem to flow so easily, the Hall Street Bakery in Grand Rapids. During my sabbatical, I was there at least five days a week and now continue to show up on nonteaching days. All I need is my notebook, a folder with ideas or drafts, a full pen and my regular—a large house coffee and a cranberry-almond scone—to set me up for a solid hour of writing. Conversations bubble from nearby tables, kids run around hopped up on sugar, drivers retrieve DoorDash orders—all set against the occasional counterpoint of the hissing espresso machine—and I am in my element. No need for Wi-Fi passwords or the elusive table next to an electrical outlet. I can walk across the room to speak with someone, order a refill, visit the men’s room—all without fearing that my laptop will disappear. And spilling coffee on my notebook or dropping it onto the floor is a minor inconvenience, not an expensive technological catastrophe. Traveling light, I can sweep up my possessions in an instant and head out the door.

    The Relevance to Reading

    In thinking about writing as a physical act that produces something you can hold, I recognized anew how relevant these same qualities are to reading. We seem today to be awash in words, yet paradoxically find ourselves in the midst of a reading crisis that extends from the youngest learners to those at America’s universities.

    An article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” convinced me that my experience with the fountain pen might be relevant to the challenges she describes.

    Horowitch reports that students at elite colleges, who have already proven their ability to read complex texts, seem less and less able (or willing) to read long literary works. She mostly ascribes this to high schools emphasizing standardized tests, to teens distracted by smartphones and to college students who view their educations in strictly transactional terms, as means to specific, often exceedingly specific, ends—which seldom include pushing through Middlemarch.

    She may be right, but the teachers and faculty she interviewed offer little beyond assigning shorter texts: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening instead of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye instead of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. A book or two at most from The Iliad or Paradise Lost.

    Let me argue, though, that the very elements I associate with composing by hand—its tactile and tangible nature, its simple conveniences—should be drawn upon when encountering long, complex and sometimes life-changing texts. And that the cool distance of the digital interface works against these very qualities.

    Yes, I know it is possible to put all your books on a single device where you can search and annotate the texts. Even if you lose your Kindle, your digital library can be retrieved from the cloud. Yet the experience of reading on the screen tends to flatten all writing, making each screen much like any other, so that the unique feel and heft of Moby-Dick, for example, is lost, making Melville’s incandescent prose indistinguishable from any Substacker’s, and probably less visually enticing.

    Even if you can resist distraction on your laptop, you never get the sensory experience unique to each book: how it feels in your hands, how its page design pulls you in or pushes you away, how its very smell when brand-new or decades old can evoke its distinctive qualities, how the satisfying sound of turning pages reaches a crescendo when you get to the end and close the cover with a resonant thump. Like the angry slam of a telephone receiver, it’s a sound beyond our digital age. And it all leads to a final moment when you place the book on a shelf to stand as a tangible reminder of your ever-changing reading life—no internet connection required.

    The physical book, that container that our society, try as it might, cannot cast into the electronic darkness, will live on. At least I hope so. A recent visit to my university’s beautiful library leaves much room for doubt. In the popular Mary Idema Pew Library Learning and Information Commons—sorry, but that’s its official name, sans commas—hundreds of students gather at any given time. But to stroll through its busy floors soon makes this book lover feel like Diogenes in search of an honest man. My lamp has seldom shined upon a student with a physical book in hand; instead, they tap and scroll their way through reading assignments in much the same way they engage daily life.

    I see them as we share the bus that travels between our university’s two campuses, filling each moment with the small screens they find far more interesting than the passing world—the season’s first snowflakes, the glow cast upon the road as dusk approaches, the deer in a harvested cornfield who look up with more curiosity than my fellow travelers.

    With a sigh—and nod to the deer—I open my copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, touching its familiar pages with my ink-stained hands, and try to remember to text my wife that I’m on my way.

    After 37 years as a professor of English at Grand Valley State University, Rob Franciosi recently retired to devote his time to writing.

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