Tag: Faculty

  • Faculty Say AI Is Impactful, but Not In a Good Way

    Faculty Say AI Is Impactful, but Not In a Good Way

    About a quarter of faculty don’t use any AI tools at all, and about a third don’t use them in teaching, according to the survey.

    Oleh Stefaniak/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    Faculty overwhelmingly agree that generative artificial intelligence will have an impact on teaching and learning in higher education, but whether that impact is positive or negative is still up for debate.

    Nine in 10 faculty members say that generative AI will diminish students’ critical thinking skills, and 95 percent say its impact will increase students’ overreliance on AI tools over time, according to a report out today from the American Association of Colleges and Universities and Elon University.

    In November, the groups surveyed 1,057 faculty members at U.S. institutions about their thoughts on generative AI’s impact. Eighty-three percent of faculty said the technology will decrease students’ attention spans, and 79 percent said they think the typical teaching model in their department will be affected by AI.

    Most professors—86 percent—said that the impact of AI on teachers will be “significant and transformative or at least noticeable,” the report states. Only 4 percent said that AI’s effect on teaching will “not amount to much.” About half of faculty respondents said AI will have a negative effect on students’ careers over the next five years, while 20 percent said it will have a positive effect and another 20 percent said it will be equally negative and positive.

    Faculty are largely unprepared for AI in the classroom, the report shows. About 68 percent of faculty said their institutions have not prepared faculty to use AI in teaching, student mentorship and scholarship. Most of their recent graduates are underprepared, too. Sixty-three percent of professors said that last spring’s graduates were not very or not at all prepared to use generative AI at work, and 71 percent said the graduates were not prepared to understand ethical issues related to AI use.

    About a quarter of faculty don’t use any AI tools at all, and about a third don’t use them in teaching, according to the report. This faculty resistance is a challenge, survey respondents say. About 82 percent of faculty said that resistance to AI or unfamiliarity with AI are hurdles in adopting the tools in their departments.

    “These findings explain why nearly half of surveyed faculty view the future impact of GenAI in their fields as more negative than positive, while only one in five see it as more positive than negative,” Lynn Pasquerella, president of the AAC&U, wrote in her introduction to the report. “Yet, this is not a story of simple resistance to change. It is, instead, a portrait of a profession grappling seriously with how to uphold educational values in a rapidly shifting technological landscape.”

    While most professors—78 percent—said AI-driven cheating is on the rise, they are split about what exactly constitutes cheating. Just over half of faculty said it’s cheating for a student to follow a detailed AI-generated outline when writing a paper, while just under half said it is either a legitimate use of AI or they’re not sure. Another 45 percent of faculty said that using generative AI to edit a paper is a legitimate use of the tool, while the remaining 55 percent said it was illegitimate or they were unsure.

    Despite their agreement on generative AI’s overall impact, faculty are split on whether AI literacy is important for students. About half of professors said AI literacy is “extremely or very important” to their students’ success, while 11 percent said it’s slightly important and 13 percent said it’s irrelevant.

    Professors held a few hopeful predictions about generative AI. Sixty-one percent of respondents said it will improve and customize learning in the future. Four in 10 professors said it will increase the ability of students to write clearly, and 41 percent said it will improve students’ research skills.

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  • Celebrating Faculty Strengths and Differences: A Positive Strategy for Thriving Academia – Faculty Focus

    Celebrating Faculty Strengths and Differences: A Positive Strategy for Thriving Academia – Faculty Focus

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  • Portland State agrees to reinstate 10 laid-off faculty members

    Portland State agrees to reinstate 10 laid-off faculty members

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    Dive Brief: 

    • Portland State University agreed to reinstate 10 non-tenure-track faculty members it laid off last year, though the institution’s president argued that officials still believe the reductions “were necessary and appropriate.” 
    • The decision follows a November ruling from an independent arbitrator that ordered the public university to reinstate the laid-off employees and concluded that the administrators had violated their collective bargaining agreement. 
    • However, Portland State President Ann Cudd said in Tuesday’s announcement that the university still must close a $35 million deficit over the next two years. “These reinstatements do not change that reality,” Cudd added. 

    Dive Insight: 

    University officials originally announced the layoffs in December 2024, notifying 17 non-tenure-track faculty members that they would be let go in June. At the time, officials said the changes were due to “changes in their departments’ programmatic and curricular needs.” 

    The announcement came as part of a larger effort to trim $18 million from the university’s budget by the end of the last fiscal year. Portland State also revamped administrative and academic structures and sent retirement offers to employees to plug the budget hole, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.   

    In May, the executive committee of the American Association of University Professors’ Portland State chapter approved sending grievances from 10 laid-off faculty members to arbitration. The other seven did not contest their layoffs. 

    On Tuesday, Cudd pushed back on the arbitrator’s findings, asserting the layoffs were conducted in “good-faith” and complied with the employees’ collective bargaining agreement. 

    “Nonetheless, we’ve decided the best step forward for our campus at this time is to comply with the arbitrator’s order,” Cudd said. 

    A university spokesperson said in an email Thursday that details about the “timeline and back pay are under negotiation.”

    The university has been attempting to remedy a budget shortfall following steep enrollment declines. 

    Portland State enrolled 19,951 students in fall 2024, down 21.2% from five years earlier. Along with the resulting decrease in tuition revenue, the university receives less money from the state because appropriations are partly based on the number of degrees and credentials it confers to Oregon residents. 

    According to the arbitrator’s findings, the driving force behind the layoffs was Portland State’s budget shortfall at the time. Because of that, the university was obligated to follow a “lengthy process” that includes declaring financial exigency. 

    But the university instead said curricular changes had driven the reductions — a reason that requires a less intensive process for layoffs. But the arbitrator said even if that had been the proper avenue, the university hadn’t followed the necessary steps to lay faculty off under that process either. 

    Moreover, the arbitrator found the university “redistributed” work performed by the laid-off faculty members. 

    For instance, the university offered some of the laid-off employees adjunct positions to teach the same courses they previously taught full time — but generally without benefits or the same level of pay. It also hired other adjunct faculty to cover their previous courses. 

    “This has reduced the employment cost to the university for the same, or expanded courses, to be taught,” the arbitrator said. 

    Portland State initially refused to reinstate the faculty members, arguing that the arbitrator’s decision exceeded her authority, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Portland State employees had been pushing the university to comply with the order, with over 260 signing a petition for the laid-off faculty members’ reinstatement as of this week. 

    Recently, Portland State’s trustee board recently approved a plan to reduce spending by $35 million over the next two years through changes to academic programs, faculty composition and administrative structures.

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  • Day 1 is Hard: Reflections on Being a First-Year Student (Again) – Faculty Focus

    Day 1 is Hard: Reflections on Being a First-Year Student (Again) – Faculty Focus

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  • Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    A recent op-ed by David Randall, executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, argues that faculty hiring in American universities has become so corrupt that it requires sweeping legislative intervention. NAS’s proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member’s position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy.

    Letter to the editor

    A letter has been submitted in response to this article. You can read the letter here, and view all of our letters to the editor here.

    The proposal’s logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If average scores decline from round to round, or if the eventual hire scored lower than dozens—or even hundreds—of rejected applicants, the public, Randall argues, should be able to “see that something is wrong.”

    But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall’s premise that a standardized test score “isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit,” the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool.

    I am a data scientist who works on issues of social justice. What concerns me is not only that NAS’s proposal is statistically unsound, but that it would mislead the public while presenting itself as transparent.

    A Statistical Mistake

    The proposed act depends on a simple idea: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If the person hired has a lower score than many rejected applicants, or if average scores decline from round to round, something must be amiss.

    This sounds intuitive. It is also wrong.

    To see why, imagine the following setup. Every applicant has some level of “true merit” for a faculty job—originality, research judgment, teaching ability, intellectual fit. We cannot observe this truth directly. Instead, we observe a standardized test score, which captures some aspects of ability but misses many others. In other words, the test score contains two parts: a signal (the part related to actual merit) and noise (everything else the test does not measure).

    Now suppose a search attracts 300 applicants, as in Randall’s own example. Assume—very generously—that the search committee somehow identifies the single best applicant by true merit and hires that person.

    Here is the crucial point: Even if test scores are meaningfully related to true merit, the best applicant will almost never have the highest test score.

    Why? Because when many people are competing, even moderate noise overwhelms rank ordering. A noisy measure will always misrank some individuals, and the larger the pool, the more dramatic those misrankings become. This is the same reason that ranking professional athletes by a single skill—free-throw percentage, say—would routinely misidentify the best overall players, especially in a large league.

    How Strong Is the Test-Merit Relationship, Really?

    Before putting numbers on this, we should ask a basic empirical question: How strongly do standardized tests actually predict the kinds of outcomes that matter in academia?

    The most comprehensive recent research on the GRE—the test most relevant to graduate education—finds minimal predictive value. A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found that GRE scores explain just over 3 percent of the variation in graduate outcomes such as GPA, degree completion and licensing exam performance. For graduate GPA specifically—the outcome the test is explicitly designed to predict—GRE scores explained only about 4 percent of the variance.

    These studies assess near-term prediction within the same educational context: GRE scores predicting outcomes for the very students who took the test, measured only a few years later—under conditions maximally favorable to the test’s validity. The NAS proposal extrapolates from evidence that is already weak even under these favorable conditions. It would evaluate faculty hiring using test scores—often SAT scores—taken at age 17, applied to candidates who may now be in their 30s, 40s or older. Direct evidence for that kind of long-term extrapolation is scarce. However, the limited evidence that does exist points towards weak relationships rather than strong ones. For instance, Google’s internal hiring studies famously found “very little correlation” between SAT scores and job performance.

    Taken together, the research suggests that any realistic relationship between standardized test scores and faculty merit is weak—certainly well below the levels needed to support NAS’s proposed diagnostics.

    What This Means in Practice

    The proposed Faculty Merit Act raises an important practical question: Even if standardized test scores contain some information about merit, how useful are they when hundreds of applicants compete for a single job?

    Taking the GRE meta-analysis at face value, standardized test scores correlate with relevant academic outcomes at only about 0.18. Treating that number as a proxy for faculty merit is already generous, given the decades that often separate testing from hiring and the profound differences between standardized exams and the actual work of a professor. But let us grant it anyway.

    Now, consider a search with 300 applicants. With a correlation of 0.18, I calculate that the single strongest candidate by true merit would typically score only around the 70th percentile on the test—roughly 90th out of 300. In other words, it would be entirely normal for around 90 rejected applicants to have higher test scores than the eventual hire.

    Nothing improper has happened. No favoritism or manipulation is required. This outcome follows automatically from combining a weak proxy with a large applicant pool.

    Even if we assume a much stronger relationship—say, a correlation of 0.30, which already exceeds what the evidence supports for most academic outcomes—the basic conclusion does not change. Under that assumption, I calculate that the best candidate would typically score only around the 80th percentile, corresponding to a rank near 60 out of 300. Dozens of rejected applicants would still have higher test scores than the person who gets the job.

    This is the point the proposal gets exactly backward. The pattern it treats as a red flag—a hire whose test score is lower than that of many rejected applicants—is not evidence of corruption. It is the normal, mathematically expected outcome whenever selection relies on an imperfect measure. Scaling this diagnostic across many searches does not make it informative; it simply reproduces the same expected misrankings at a larger scale.

    Why ‘Scores Dropped Each Round’ Proves Nothing

    The same logic applies to the claim that average test scores should increase at each stage of a search.

    Faculty hiring is not one-dimensional. Early stages might screen for general competence; later stages may emphasize originality, research direction, teaching effectiveness and departmental fit—traits that standardized tests measure poorly or not at all. As a search progresses, committees naturally place less weight on test scores and more weight on other information. When that happens, average test scores among finalists can stay flat or even decline. That pattern does not signal manipulation. It signals that the committee is selecting on dimensions that actually matter for the job.

    Transparency, Justice and Bad Diagnostics

    Randall’s op-ed, published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, frames the proposal as a response to injustice. But transparency based on invalid diagnostics does not mitigate injustice; it produces it.

    Publishing standardized test scores invites the public to draw conclusions that those numbers cannot support—and those conclusions will not fall evenly. Standardized test scores are strongly shaped by socioeconomic background and access to resources. Treating them as a universal yardstick of merit—especially for faculty careers—will predictably disadvantage scholars from marginalized and nontraditional paths.

    From the standpoint of justice, this is deeply concerning. Accountability mechanisms must rest on sound reasoning. Otherwise, they become tools for enforcing hierarchy rather than fairness.

    If the goal is genuine academic renewal, it should begin with renewing our understanding of what numbers can—and cannot—tell us. Merit cannot be mandated by publishing the wrong metrics, and justice is not served by statistical arguments that collapse under careful inspection.

    Chad M. Topaz is a faculty member at Williams College; co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity; and winner of the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May, and can be found on Bluesky at @chadtopaz.

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  • Supporting Students Through Feedback: Approaches for Faculty – Faculty Focus

    Supporting Students Through Feedback: Approaches for Faculty – Faculty Focus

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  • Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

    Texas just made it easier for students to report DEI, faculty senate violations

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    Dive Brief:

    • Texas officials are encouraging college students, employees and the public to report violations of the state’s ban on faculty senates and diversity, equity and inclusion in higher education.
    • The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board’s newly created Office of the Ombudsman launched the Students First portal — separate from its existing student complaint portal — to give “the public easy access to file complaints and provide feedback” over colleges’ alleged legal violations.
    • Through Students First, college students and employees can submit formal complaints and are not required to have previously filed a complaint with the college. Members of the public can submit informal feedback.

    Dive Insight:

    The Students First portal focuses on violations of two significant Texas laws — 2023’s SB 17 and 2025′ SB 37.

    SB 17 prohibited colleges from having diversity offices or hiring employees to do DEI-focused work. It also banned mandatory DEI training for employees and students.

    While SB 17 functionally outlawed DEI at public colleges — making Texas one of the first to enact legislation growing increasingly popular in conservative states — SB 37 focused primarily on academic governance.

    The law stripped faculty senates of much of their authority and autonomy and shifted that power to political appointees. SB 37 also established the THECB’s ombudsman office. Earlier this month, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Brandon Simmons, the chair of the Texas Southern University Board of Regents, to lead the office.

    Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton, author of SB 37, said in April that the bill is meant to affirm authority over public colleges lies with regents, not faculty. In Texas, regents are appointed by the governor.

    Prior to its passage, higher education advocates and faculty groups — including the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors and the Texas American Federation of Teachers — strongly opposed SB 37 and raised concerns over the erosion of academic freedom and increased political influence on college campuses.

    Creighton, who also wrote SB 17, resigned from the Legislature in October after being named the chancellor of the Texas Tech University System.

    In September, Abbott said Texas is “targeting professors who are more focused on pushing leftist ideologies rather than preparing students to lead our nation.” The following month, Texas policymakers launched new select committees in the state House and Senate and tasked them with reporting on “bias, discourse, and freedom of speech” on college campuses.

    If the ombudsman office decides to investigate a formal complaint, the affected college will be notified within five days. From there, the college has 175 days to respond to the complaint — barring an office-granted extension — and 30 days to respond to any written requests for additional information.

    If the college is found to be out of compliance, it has 180 days to resolve the issues to the ombudsman office’s satisfaction.

    The ombudsman office will “submit to the Ombudsman and State Auditor a report on the noncompliance that includes the recommendations” if it determines the college “has not resolved issues and recommendations identified in the report,” according to the Students First portal.

    Simmons said Friday that he aims to foster a “collaborative, productive partnership with our institutional leaders and students” through the new “user-friendly website and engagement on campuses across Texas.”

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  • Faculty Are Often Unprepared to Teach About Race (opinion)

    Faculty Are Often Unprepared to Teach About Race (opinion)

    Faculty teaching about race do so in a moment when public scrutiny of higher education is heightened, federal policies are shifting, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being dismantled. Even as the stakes continue rising, the instructional support for teaching race remains thin. Classroom missteps become fodder for political commentary, investigations and legislative action, not because DEI is failing—but because higher education has not prepared faculty for the instructional demands of this work.

    In recent years, a series of classroom incidents has sparked social media outrage and press coverage questioning whether faculty can responsibly teach about race and racism. This past fall, a federal civil rights complaint filed against Colorado State University objected to how two social-work instructors were teaching about race: The instructors reportedly detailed in a journal article how they treated discomfort as a measure of instructional success, characterizing student dissent as “whitelash” or an attempt to maintain “white emotional comfort.” And, in November, Texas A&M University adopted sweeping new rules restricting professors from advocating for “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” after an instructor’s lesson on gender identity drew political scrutiny.

    Similar conflicts, large and small, have surfaced at other institutions where comments, assignments or facilitation missteps around race have escalated into campuswide crises, legislative attention, or national media backlash. For critics of DEI work, the story is a familiar one, each conflict another example of what they believe is a misguided and coercive approach to discussing race in the academy.

    But these cases are not evidence that DEI is failing. They’re evidence that higher education continues to position instructors to teach about race without adequate preparation, support or instructional training. The result is predictable. Classroom conversations break down, students withdraw or react defensively, and faculty fall back on reductive frameworks that flatten complexity instead of deepening understanding. When the inevitable conflict arises, external critics seize on those moments as proof that DEI itself is the problem.

    As someone who has spent more than two decades teaching courses on race and racism, preparing PK-12 educators and school leaders, and facilitating difficult conversations across racial, political and socioeconomic contexts, I recognize many of the dynamics described in recent reports.

    I have seen classrooms fracture when conversations about race are mishandled. I have also seen classrooms strengthen and deepen when race is taught skillfully, developmentally and with transparency about the learning process—not with the goal of making certain students, based on their race, feel uncomfortable.

    Why Higher Ed Keeps Getting This Wrong

    Too often, instructors are left to navigate high-stakes, emotionally charged conversations with little guiding them beyond readings and good intentions. They confuse discomfort with learning or treat identity categories as complete explanations for how students respond. They assume that naming systemic racism is enough to foster insight. They treat emotional reactions as confessions rather than data. And they interpret dissent as avoidance rather than inquiry.

    Teaching about race is not the same thing as talking about race. It is not sufficient to have strong convictions, an antiracist syllabus or a set of readings that challenge dominant narratives. Teaching about race effectively, humanely and rigorously is adaptive work. It requires attention to the meaning-making capacities adults bring to the classroom, the emotional and cognitive demands of confronting unfamiliar histories, and the complex identity threats that discussions of racism can activate.

    Unfortunately, many college instructors are asked to lead these conversations without any formal preparation in adult learning theory, without much practice facilitating difficult dialogues, and without much exposure to exercising racial literacy skills. Graduate programs rarely include coursework on how adults learn, how to hold tension productively, or how to differentiate instruction for learners at different developmental stages. Faculty development programs typically focus on instructional tools, strategies or course design, not the psychological and relational capacities required to teach race well.

    The result is that many faculty default to one of two equally ineffective approaches: avoidance, in which the fear of mistakes or conflict leads instructors to sanitize discussions about race or eliminate them entirely; or overcorrection, in which instructors push students into discomfort prematurely, recast struggle as resistance or treat identity categories as proxies for understanding. Both approaches undermine learning. And both approaches, ironically, feed the narrative that DEI is coercive, dogmatic or intellectually fragile.

    Misinterpreting Discomfort

    A common misstep in teaching about race and racism is treating discomfort as the goal rather than the byproduct of learning. Discomfort emerges when students confront unfamiliar histories or grapple with the implications of structural racism. But causing discomfort without further reflection is not instructive. In fact, adult learning research shows that when learners do not understand why they feel discomfort, or when they interpret it as a personal indictment rather than information, they often shut down, deflect or retreat into defensiveness.

    Barbara Larrivee’s work on reflective teaching practice emphasizes that adults deepen their reflective capacity not when they are emotionally overwhelmed, but when they can connect feelings to meaning. Tyrone Howard is especially clear that reflective practice around race is emotionally demanding and must be scaffolded, particularly for students who have had limited or no prior engagement with racial analysis.

    Deborah Helsing, Annie Howell, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s research demonstrates that adults grow when they can safely examine their assumptions, not when they are forced into emotional exposure without a supportive structure. Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky’s concept of a “holding environment” underscores the importance of creating a space strong enough to contain tension and flexible enough to meet learners where they are developmentally.

    When instructors lack this grounding, discomfort can be misread as resistance, and resistance can be treated as evidence of fragility without further inquiry. The learning process collapses.

    Identity Is Context, Not Destiny

    Another pitfall revealed in some cases that escalate into public controversy is the assumption that a student’s response can be fully explained by racial or gender identity. While identity informs perspective, it does not predetermine it. H. Richard Milner IV consistently argues that classroom discussions of race must be deliberate, contextual and connected to students’ lived realities, structural inequities and institutional power.

    Treating students as illustrations of demographic categories rather than as complex thinkers with varied histories and meaning-making capacities undermines trust and flattens what should be a nuanced dialogue. It also discourages dissent and the kind of intellectual engagement that we are meant to cultivate. Students deserve classrooms where questions are welcomed, disagreements are examined rather than punished, and identity is treated as a lens, not a verdict.

    The Real Risk: We Are Handing Evidence to DEI’s Critics

    Faculty who teach about race are working in a political climate where the stakes are extraordinarily high. White House executive orders and state laws across the country have restricted what can be taught about race. Public trust in higher education is declining. DEI offices are being dismantled.

    In this landscape, when classrooms fall apart, the consequences extend far beyond a single course. They reinforce public misconceptions about DEI, embolden efforts to roll back equity-focused policies, and weaken institutional commitments to preparing students for democratic citizenship in a multiracial society.

    Conservative media has built a profitable outrage economy from these incidents, some real and some exaggerated. Every time a classroom implodes, the anti-DEI movement grows stronger with a new case affirming a preexisting narrative: DEI is dogma, DEI is coercion, DEI is emotional manipulation, DEI is identity reductionism.

    But these explanations are not the inevitable outcomes of teaching about race; they are the avoidable consequences of poorly designed learning environments and instructors’ unexamined assumptions. They describe the worst of DEI as if it were the whole of DEI. And colleges, by failing to teach race well, continue to hand DEI’s critics the evidence they need.

    Making the Pivot

    Adults do not grow when they are humiliated, cornered or shamed into silence. They grow when instructors make their reasoning visible, invite critique and create structured environments where difficult emotions can be examined rather than weaponized. Students learn when they are challenged in ways that help them make meaning of their experiences, not in ways that reinforce fear or defensiveness.

    Through trial, error and learning alongside colleagues committed to adaptive adult learning, I’ve found that effective teaching about race requires several related commitments:

    Instructional transparency: making our own assumptions, reasoning and uncertainties visible so that students understand the purpose and process of the learning.

    A shared framework for inquiry: establishing norms that distinguish exploration from accusation and help students make sense of emotional responses without weaponizing them.

    Developmentally aligned challenges: recognizing that students arrive with different capacities for complexity and designing learning opportunities that meet them where they are, while nudging them forward.

    Treating dissent as data: understanding pushback not as avoidance, but as information about what needs clarification, probing or more practical contextualization.

    When faculty practice these commitments, difficult conversations are not something to endure—they are opportunities for insight. Discomfort emerges organically rather than being imposed. Identity becomes context, not destiny. And students stay in the work long enough for significant learning to occur.

    If colleges and universities want students to think critically about history, identity, power and inequality, they must invest in preparing faculty for that work. That means faculty development centered on adult learning, racial literacy, adaptive teaching and facilitation of complex intergroup dialogue, not just compliance training or lists of “dos and don’ts.” It means recognizing that teaching about race is sophisticated instructional work, not a box to check.

    Without institutional support from university leaders, faculty will continue to be underprepared to teach subject matter deemed too politically controversial—despite its importance to preparing civic-minded, informed citizens capable of productive dialogue with people who have entirely different viewpoints and life experiences.

    A Call to Higher Education

    The recent controversies at Colorado State, Texas A&M or those yet to be reported should not discourage colleges and universities (or PK-12 schools) from teaching about race or lead them to abandon the faculty committed to doing so responsibly. If this moment helps us move toward a more rigorous, developmental and humane approach to teaching about race and racism, it will have done something important. It could challenge us to teach race far better than many of us do.

    John Pascarella is a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and chief academic officer of the USC Race and Equity Center.

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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  • Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

    Designing AI-Resistant Assignments in Educational Leadership Courses – Faculty Focus

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