Tag: Higher

A letter to NEH on compliance with Trump orders (opinion)
On Feb. 11, the National Endowment for the Humanities announced on its website that it had modified its funding criteria for eligible humanities projects in compliance with three recent executive orders. According to the announcement, “NEH awards may not be used for the following purposes:
- promotion of gender ideology;
- promotion of discriminatory equity ideology;
- support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) initiatives or activities; or
- environmental justice initiatives or activities.”
These prohibitions impose the terminology of Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 onto future applicants for NEH funding, whether individual scholars, museums, nonprofit organizations or colleges (including historically Black colleges and universities and tribal colleges). Published well within the stipulated 60-day window for government agency compliance with the order to terminate all “equity-related” initiatives, grants or contracts, these prohibitions represent a swift implementation of the Trump administration’s point-by-point mandate for “Ending Radical Indoctrination.”

I can only begin to conjecture here about what the consequences of the NEH’s new criteria might be for the humanities, the domain of cultural and intellectual inquiry the NEH was created to foster. To cite the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, “While no government can call a great artist or scholar into existence, it is necessary and appropriate for the Federal Government to help create and sustain not only a climate encouraging freedom of thought, imagination, and inquiry but also the material conditions facilitating the release of this creative talent.”

To uphold conditions defined by prohibition rather than freedom—and with prohibitions explicitly targeting the right to existence of queer and transgender people (“gender ideology”), the ability in any way to offset egregious structural inequalities in educational and cultural access (“DEI”), and even the very right to advocate on behalf of anyone’s rights (“discriminatory equity ideology”)—is to betray the very terms under which the NEH was created. In revising its Notice of Funding Opportunities, the NEH is in violation of its public mission.

Presumably, as a government agency perpetually under threat of budget cuts, the NEH hastened to implement Trump’s executive orders in order to fend off wholesale elimination. The NEH is a federal agency and is thus directly implicated in the executive orders, provided those orders are constitutional. By complying with Trump’s ideology, the National Endowment may perhaps live to see another day, thereby preserving the careers of at least some of its approximately 185 employees and its ability—to do what?

The NEH has not yet fully overhauled its website to reflect its compliance. Of its current listings of Great Projects Past and Present, perhaps “The Papers of George Washington,” “Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition,” and “The Real Buffalo Bill” might manage to squeeze through under the new stipulations, but would the Created Equal documentary film project be so lucky? Would a biography of union organizer César Chavez manage to qualify as a fundable project, or a documentary about “A Black Surgeon in the Age of Jim Crow”? How about the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database? The NEH has leveraged its own institutional survival on the forfeit of future such projects.

The problem is a far deeper one, however. In what universe should it be too much to ask that a state-sponsored institution created to uphold the “material conditions” for freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry put up even the slightest resistance to the inhumane, reactionary and repressive edicts issued by the Trump regime? Even today, the NEH website champions its past support for projects that uphold justice in the face of oppression, that resist totalitarian erasure. Yet the NEH itself has mustered no such resistance. Instead, it has announced that any such projects are now ineligible for consideration.

Of one thing I am certain: The National Endowment for the Humanities has forfeited its claim to the word “humanities.” The humanities do not designate a prohibitive sphere of capitulation to ruling forces. The humanities are not furthered by a governmental agency that serves, willingly or unwillingly, as an ideological extension of a political party. The humanities are a domain of inquiry, of questioning and investigation, not of unquestioning acquiescence.

As a literature professor and an educator in the humanities for more than a quarter century, I have assured my students that the study of cultural, artistic and intellectual production is continuous with its practice. This not only means that humanistic inquiry involves creativity, creation and a commitment to thinking freely, but it also means that humanistic inquiry necessarily upholds the same responsibility to questions of ethics, value and meaning with which any other historical action must reckon. Humanists cannot, and do not, stand meekly aside while the “real” agents of historical change make big decisions.

In posting a recent message to the frequently asked questions web form on the NEH website, I wrote that in light of the NEH’s silent capitulation to Trump’s executive orders, I was ashamed to call myself a humanist. I hereby recant that statement. I am not ashamed to call myself a humanist. It is the National Endowment for the Humanities that should be ashamed. Or, better yet, I call on the NEH and all its 185 employees, including and especially NEH chair Shelly C. Lowe, to recant their compliance with Executive Orders 14151, 14168 and 14190 and join other national and international agencies, organizations and individuals in resisting the inhumane and unconstitutional decrees of the Trump administration.

Jonathan P. Eburne is a professor of comparative literature, English and French and Francophone studies at Pennsylvania State University and director of undergraduate studies in comparative literature.
Source link
February 28, 2025
Final “Intellectual Affairs” column by Scott McLemee (opinion)

The historian and political analyst Garry Wills once described writing for magazines and newspapers as a way to continue his education while getting paid to do it. The thought made a lasting impression on me and has been a driving force since well before I started writing “Intellectual Affairs” in 2005.

Twenty years is a sizable portion of anyone’s life; a kind of record of it exists in the form of something short of a thousand columns. I am a slow writer (my wonderful and long-suffering editors at IHE can confirm this), and quantifying the amount of time invested in each piece would probably make me feel older, even, than I look.

The launch of the column came after a decade of covering scholarly books and debates, first as a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and then as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. The founders of Inside Higher Ed approached me with an offer of far less money but complete freedom in what and how I wrote. The decision was easy to make. The offer seemed as close to tenure as a perpetual student could hope to get.

The shift from writing for dead-tree publications to an online-only venue was not an obvious choice to make, but IHE’s audience and reputation grew rapidly. Getting review copies of new books was not always straightforward or quick. Confusion with other publications having similar names was also a problem. But “Intellectual Affairs” began to draw a certain amount of attention—whether enthusiastic, contemptuous or trollish—in the academic blogosphere of the day.

The work itself, while grueling at times, was for the most part gratifying. Scholars would write to express astonishment that I’d actually read their books, and even understood them. It seemed best to regard that as a compliment.

I tend to forget about a column as soon as it’s finished and rarely look at it again. To explain this it is impossible to improve upon Samuel Johnson, who was a columnist of sorts even though the term had not yet been coined. In 1752 he wrote,

“He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day will often bring to his task attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topic till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce.”

It’s not always that bad, but the experience he describes is familiar and typically yields the resolution to start earlier next time. But there is no next time with this column.

I’ve revisited the digital archive in recent days to assemble the selection below. If “Intellectual Affairs” has served as the notebook of an intellectual vagabond, here are a few pages from a long, strange trip.

Among the earlier columns was one considering the practice of annotating texts while you are reading—specifically, ones printed on paper with ink. A few people found my account of an improvised method useful. These days I mark up PDFs along much the same lines.

Much Sturm und Drang over e-publishing was underway during the column’s first decade—not least in scholarly circles. A column from 2014 surveys some of the trends predicted, emergent and/or collapsing at the time. Another piece described efforts to rethink literary history with an eye to the prevailing energy sources at the time a text was written.

More offbeat (and a personal favorite) was this exposé of the unspeakable secret behind Miskatonic University’s financial stability. Another piece brought together the purported psychic powers of Edgar Cayce, a.k.a. “the sleeping prophet,” with news of a technological advance permitting someone to “read” a closed book, or its first few pages, at any rate.

Early in the last decade, the New York Public Library prepared to offload a sizable portion of its holdings to locations outside the city—freeing up space for more computer terminals. Scholars and citizens spoke up in protest. A second column was necessary to correct the record after an official spun his way through a response to the first one.

Compulsive and compulsory technological change was at issue in this column suggesting that the Pixar film WALL-E owed a lot to the dystopian satire presented in the cultural theorist Kenneth Burke’s “Helhaven” essays. It was a bit of a stretch, sure, but the point was to honor their “margin of overlap,” as KB would say.

Many interviews ran in “Intellectual Affairs” over the years. Two in particular stand out. The earliest was with Barbara Ehrenreich on the occasion of her 2005 book about white-collar labor. I also reviewed two of her later books, here and here.

The other interview was with George Scialabba—a public intellectual working at a certain distance from the tenure track—on the occasion of his first book. His collected essays appeared not too long ago.

I stand by this assessment of Cornel West’s self-portrait. It caused a ruckus for a few days, but nothing changed in its wake, which is disappointing.

While by no means prescient, a column on the scholarly study of ignorance from 2008 still feels topical. The subject remained far too relevant 15 years later. Someone will eventually start an Institute for Applied Agnotology; it won’t have trouble finding financial backing.

Also distressingly perennial is a column considering social-scientific analysis of American demagogues of the 1930s and ’40s. A sequel of sorts, at least in hindsight, was this look into the stagnant depths of a spree killer’s worldview. And I was at work on a column about Ku Klux Klan historiography when Charlottesville broke into the news.

Less connected to the news cycle but likewise bloody was an item filed after attending a seldom-performed Shakespeare play in 2009. A year earlier, I looked into the far-fetched legend that The Tempest was inspired by a small island near New Bedford, Mass. (Copies of this column were available for a while in pamphlet form at the local historical society.)

Finally—and a matter of bragging rights— there’s this piece on the first volume of a biography of the long-forgotten Hubert Harrison, a Caribbean-born African American polymath and pan-African activist from the early 20th century. On more than one occasion the author told me that nothing generated more interest in the book than the column.

George Orwell characterized the professional book reviewer as someone “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time.” I once considered this amusing; now it makes me wince. (It’s not even a whole pint, mind you.) The rewards of non-celebrity-oriented cultural journalism tend to be meager and infrequent, but writing this column for Inside Higher Ed has provided more than my share. Thanks in particular to Scott Jaschik, Sarah Bray and Elizabeth Redden for their patience and keen eyes.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

Source link

February 28, 2025
How cuts at U.S. aid agency hinder university research

Peter Goldsmith knows there’s a lot to love about soybeans. Although the crop is perhaps best known in America for its part in the stereotypically bougie soy milk latte, it plays an entirely different role on the global stage. Inexpensive to grow and chock-full of nutrients, it’s considered a potential solution to hunger and malnutrition.

For the past 12 years, Goldsmith has worked toward that end. In 2013, he founded the Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and every day since then, the lab’s scientists have worked to help farmers and businesses solve problems related to soybeans, from how to speed up threshing—the arduous process of separating the bean from the pod—to addressing a lack of available soybean seeds and varieties.

The SIL, which now encompasses a network of 17 laboratories, has completed work across 31 countries, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa. But now, all that work is on hold, and Goldsmith is preparing to shut down the Soybean Innovation Lab in April, thanks to massive cuts to the federal foreign aid funds that support the labs.

A week into the current presidential administration, Goldsmith received notice that the Soybean Innovation Lab, which is headquartered at the University of Illinois, had to pause operations, cease external communications and minimize costs, pending a federal government review.

Goldsmith told his team—about 30 individuals on UIUC’s campus that he described as being like family to one another—that, though they were ordered to stop work, they could continue working on internal projects, like refining their software. But days later, he learned the university could no longer access the lab’s funds in Washington, meaning there was no way to continue paying employees.

After talking with university administrators, he set a date for the Illinois lab to close: April 15, unless the freeze ended after the government review. But no review materialized; on Feb. 26, the SIL received notice its grant had been terminated, along with about 90 percent of the U.S. Agency for International Development’s programs.

“The University of Illinois is a very kind, caring sort of culture; [they] wanted to give employees—because it was completely an act of God, out of the blue—give them time to find jobs,” he said. “I mean, up until [Jan. 27], we were full throttle, we were very successful, phones ringing off the hook.”

The other 16 labs will likely also close, though some are currently scrambling to try to secure other funding.

Federal funding made up 99 percent of the Illinois lab’s funding, according to Goldsmith. In 2022, the lab received a $10 million grant intended to last through 2027.

Dismantling an Agency

The SIL is among the numerous university laboratories impacted by the federal freeze on U.S. Agency for International Development funds—an initial step in what’s become President Donald Trump’s crusade to curtail supposedly wasteful government spending—and the subsequent termination of thousands of grants.

Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man on Earth and a senior aide to the president, have baselessly claimed that USAID is run by left-wing extremists and say they hope to shutter the agency entirely. USAID’s advocates, meanwhile, have countered that the agency instead is responsible for vital, lifesaving work abroad and that the funding freeze is sure to lead to disease, famine and death.

A federal judge, Amir H. Ali, seemed to agree, ruling earlier this month that the funding freeze is doing irreparable harm to humanitarian organizations that have had to cut staff and halt projects, NPR and other outlets reported. On Tuesday, Ali reiterated his order that the administration resume funding USAID, giving them until the end of the day Wednesday to do so.

But the administration appealed the ruling, and the Supreme Court subsequently paused the deadline until the justices can weigh in. Now, officials appear to be moving forward with plans to fire all but a small number of the agency’s employees, directing employees to empty their offices and giving them only 15 minutes each to gather their things.

About $350 million of the agency’s funds were appropriated to universities, according to the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, including $72 million for the Feed the Future Innovation Labs, which are aimed at researching solutions to end hunger and food insecurity worldwide. (The SIL is funded primarily by Feed the Future.)

It’s a small amount compared to the funding universities receive from other agencies, like the National Institutes of Health, also the subject of deep cuts by Trump and Musk. But USAID-funded research is a long-standing and important part of the nation’s foreign policy, as well as a resource for the international community, advocates say. The work also has broad, bipartisan support; in fiscal year 2024, Congress increased funding for the Feed the Future Initiative labs by 16 percent, according to Craig Lindwarm, senior vice president for government affairs at the APLU, even in what he characterized as an extremely challenging budgetary environment.

Potential Long-Term Harms

Universities “have long been a partner with USAID … to help accomplish foreign policy and diplomatic goals of the United States,” said Lindwarm. “This can often but not exclusively come in the form of extending assistance as it relates to our agricultural institutions, and land-grant institutions have a long history of advancing science in agriculture that boosts yields and productivity in the United States and also partner countries, and we’ve found that this is a great benefit not just to our country, but also partner nations. Stable food systems lead to stable regions and greater market access for producers in the United States and furthers diplomatic objectives in establishing stronger connections with partner countries.”

Stopping that research has negatively impacted “critical relationships and productivity,” with the potential for long-term harms, Lindwarm said.

At the SIL, numerous projects have now been canceled, including a planned trip to Africa to beta test a pull-behind combine, a technology that is not commonly used anymore in the U.S.—most combines are now self-propelled rather than pulled by tractor—but that would be useful to farmers in Africa. A U.S. company was slated to license the technology to farmers in Africa, Goldsmith said, but now, “that’s dead. The agribusiness firm, the U.S. firm, won’t be licensing in Africa,” he said. “A good example of market entry just completely shut off.”

He also noted that the lab closures won’t just impact clients abroad and U.S. companies; they will also be detrimental to UIUC, which did not respond to a request for comment.

“In our space, we’re well-known. We’re really relevant. It makes the university extremely relevant,” he said. “We’re not an ivory tower. We’re in the dirt, literally, with our partners, with our clients, making a difference, and [that] makes the university an active contributor to solving real problems.”

Source link

February 28, 2025
Cathedralic Higher Education – HEPI

With the major challenges facing UK higher education at present, it is perhaps hardly surprising that many in the sector are concentrating on the short term. Survival rather than strategy is the order of the day. Higher education institutions (HEIs), though, are fundamentally long-term operations which educate students and undertake research intended to benefit society for many years to come.

Indeed, they embody what has been labelled ‘cathedral thinking’, that is, a long-term activity which is ultimately for the good of future generations. There is a real risk, though, that the short-termism endemic in institutions and wider society will undermine this core attribute of HEIs.

Here and now

The UK higher education sector is, arguably, facing some of the biggest challenges it has for generations. Coping with the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and the worldwide recession following the 2007-08 financial crisis was hugely difficult, but they feel, in hindsight, somehow to be less problematic than where we are now.

Everyone is focused on survival, on getting through the next month, the next term, the next academic year. Certainly there is much lobbying going on from Universities UK, Vice-Chancellors and sector groupings to seek to persuade the government to do the right things for the sector in the forthcoming 2025 spending review. But, as the THE reported in garnering sector views on the year ahead, there is a great deal of uncertainty. Nick Hillman, quoted in the article, notes that the nature of politics, which HEIs are currently grappling with, is ‘a dirty, mucky, short-term, quick-fix sort of business.’

While Universities UK’s Vivienne Stern believes that many HEIs have already made or begun to make the difficult changes required to cope with the challenges ahead, the longer-term investments in infrastructure and facilities which are required to sustain and develop a world-class higher education offer remain somewhere in the future.

At times of great challenge, it is difficult to look beyond the immediate problems, the in-your-face issues which just have to be addressed, or there might be no future. Higher Education institutions should be well-placed to take longer-term views of everything and not be distracted by temporary turbulence. Many have been around for centuries in one form or another and have found ways to survive even when times were really, really tough. And yet it does feel that in common with just about every other organisation, HEIs are focused very much on the short term.

Planning the long game

However, so much in an HEI has to be viewed as long-term. Decisions around the development of the estate, research priorities, student recruitment and fundraising all require plans and commitment to sustained investment over the years.

Whilst strategic planning is often the subject of cynicism or even mockery in HEIs and strategies are easily critiqued as being very similar, they serve a really important purpose in drawing the institutional community’s attention to the need to consider the components of the long-term success of the enterprise. Strategic plans also provide a framework for decision-making and a set of markers to ensure that the long term is not forgotten in all of the current noise and turbulence. This feels more important now, given societal trends of focusing only on the immediate issues and the current challenges facing the sector.

Cathedral thinking

HEIs have all the ingredients to ensure they balance short-term needs and longer-term priorities. The nature of education and research dictates a different perspective. Private sector companies frequently beat themselves up about this kind of thing and try to find ways to move away from a model which demands a relentless focus on short term profitability at the expense of long-term success.

The idea of cathedral thinking, of delivering for future generations rather than just the current shareholders, has gained some purchase recently as companies have sought to develop a sense of purpose beyond just profit and be clearer with their investors what the long-term plan is. They have also sought to clarify longer-term goals and measure progress towards them whilst developing a culture which is focused on the long term. Universities and colleges are here already.

The worry is, though that they are being pushed in the other direction, towards the short term rather than the more distant future. Indeed, governing bodies are often dissatisfied with the kind of key performance indicators that institutions generate, which are inherently longer-term. Most of them change on an annual basis at best, and some of them, such as the Research Excellent Framework or Teaching Excellence Framework outcomes, are only reported over a much longer timescale.

As an aside, one of the important examples of taking a long-term view is in the appointment of staff. Careful and considered appointments are fundamentally long-term decisions. Many years ago when I worked at the University of Warwick, the ethos in appointing new administrators was very much about the long term. This was articulated, quaintly as it now seems, as ‘do they have a registrar’s baton in their knapsack?’ but the long-term view was clear in relation to the potential of appointees.

Universities and colleges should be really good at this. Not only is the fundamental service offered a long-term one, but everyone spends ages every few years developing strategic plans, which are just that, plans setting out the strategic, long-term ambitions for the university. These are usually the product of substantial dialogue across the institution and with governing bodies and external stakeholders.

Planning and punching

As Mike Tyson famously said when asked whether he was worried about the plan Evander Holyfield was said to have for their forthcoming fight: ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ It’s not a hugely original comment, even in boxing, and echoes the old military adage that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy.’ Finding a way both to respond to the immediate shock or issue and to consider the actions which will serve best for long term success is challenging. But it is essential if everything is not to be about just dealing with what is in your face (literally or metaphorically) right now and that your plans can be flexed to cope with the new reality.

HEIs have to take a long-term view, but that is difficult when governments struggle to see beyond the next stage in the current election cycle. This is the dirty and mucky nature of politics described by Hillman. To ensure long-term certainty, universities and colleges ultimately have to take more into their own hands. This means a more vigorous defence of institutional autonomy while at the same time engaging with government priorities. It also means finding new ways to collaborate and to push back against the tide of excessive and burdensome regulation. Above all, though, it means taking the long-term view – cathedralic higher education.

Source link

February 28, 2025
Higher education postcard: the university court
We’re in Aberystwyth again this week, but not for an in-depth look at the university – we’ve done that before.

Instead, we’re going to look into an aspect of old university governance, with an Aberystwyth artefact. This is a draft report to the University Court of Governors.

The older, chartered universities in the UK (which means, broadly, those founded between 1800 and 1992) tended to have three bodies involved in governance:
- A senate, which was the academic decision-making body of the university, comprising all or some of the university’s academic staff
- A council, which was the governing body of the university, but which couldn’t take a decision on an academic matter without first consulting the senate
- A court, made up of stakeholders (ie graduates, local bigwigs, learned society representatives), which had very few if any powers, but to which council must account for itself and its activities.
Typically speaking, a court would meet once a year. Its powers might include appointing the chancellor of the university, but that is a ceremonial role, so is a very limited practical power (although one over which universities occasionally trip up). And at the annual meeting, there would be reports from the vice chancellor, and questions, and then that would be it for another year.

Now, this report is from a college of the University of Wales, which was a federal university. This means I’m not clear whether the report was to the court of the University College of Wales Aberystwyth, or to the court of the federal University of Wales. But either way, it gives a fascinating snapshot of what accountability looked like in 1920. (And if you know about the governance of the University of Wales in 1920, please do say in the comments below!)

The report would have been the first under the principalship of John Humphreys Davies, pictured here.

Davies was an alumnus of Aberystwyth; he succeeded Thomas Francis Roberts, who had been principal from 1891 to 1919, and had died in August of that year whilst still principal. He had since 1905 been registrar of University College Aberystwyth, making him another rare example of progression from senior professional service roles to institutional leadership.

The report starts with a brief statistical summary. It shows the impact of the first world war on numbers: there were 298 students in 1917–18; 410 in 1918–19, and 971 in 1919–20. About 30 per cent of the students were women; over 70 per cent came from south Wales; over 15 per cent from north Wales; over 10 per cent from England. And the remainder – nineteen students in total – came from Egypt, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, France, India, Java, Jamaica and an unexpectedly large contingent – ten students – from Serbia.

There’s then a report on degree examinations, recording each student who had taken degree examinations, for bachelor of arts, master of arts, and certificates of education. I haven’t counted the names, but they stretch for fifteen pages of the report, so it looks like all of the students at the college. Jones is the most frequent name, with 60 in the faculty of arts, three in law, 31 in science, and two for the certificate in education. And we also get a report on alumni who had gained degrees from the University of London, or gained scholarships at Oxford.

And then the fun starts. Written reports from every department, starting with Greek, ending with the Officer Training Corps Contingent. Here are a few extracts:

Mr Jenkins, Greek: ‘Special: only two students took the course. Of these, Mr Neil Evans more than maintained his promise of the preceding session and attained a high standard in the examinations. As he intends to take Latin Honours in 1921, it may not be possible for him next session to devote to Greek as much time as he would wish, but if he can defer Greek honours till 1922, there is every prospect of his attaining a high class. The other candidate, Miss Young Evans, also did quite well, and showed improvement on the work of 1919.’

We have become much more squeamish about naming individuals in formal papers, even when praising them, or damning them with faint praise. Poor Miss Young Evans.

Professor Atkins, English: ‘The work this session has on the whole been satisfactory, though difficulties have not been wanting, owing to the large increase in the number of students and the varying ability of the ex-service students to settle down to serious study…’

Demobilisation was clearly not without its downsides.

We also get a fascinating insight into examination success rates. Here’s the data for undergraduate exams in English:

By my reckoning, this is a pass rate about 72 per cent for intermediate, 58 per cent for ordinary and 64 per cent for special levels. What would we make of these rates today?

We learn that the library received gifts including 600 volumes from the library of the late Principal Thomas Francis Roberts; the review of the Aberdeen Angus Cattle Society; the proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin; and the report of the Association of Headmistresses in London. And, excitingly, that Miss Cummings of the Bodleian Library in Oxford has been appointed cataloguer to classify and catalogue the library’s holdings “in accordance with the rules of the Library of Congress.”

We have the first report from Professor Zimmern, the founding chair of international politics at Aberystwyth, a subject in which the college was to gain much renown.

And let’s end this set of extracts with this, about the Normal College’s music students. (You’ll remember that the Normal College, in Bangor, focused on teacher training.)

Apathy, irregularity and a lack of preparation. A sad and sorry state of affairs. I wonder if it was ever thus?

Overall I’m struck by the level of detail and the minutiae in the report. There’s a flavour of what life must have been like at Aberystwyth, and an openness to accountability which is interesting. Maybe it’s a genuine transparency, maybe it’s a desire to hide big issues behind the day-to-day. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it.

I’ve got two jigsaws for you today. First the postcard at the top; and then a double page spread from the report, just for the sheer fun of it.
Source link
February 28, 2025
Supporting higher education’s emerging leaders

In the ever evolving world of higher education, effective leaders are required at all levels of our organisations.

Emerging leaders lead in the middle of an organisation, with responsibility for delivering aspects of an institution’s mission, vision and strategy. Their roles are wide-ranging, they work with colleagues at all levels, striving to deliver an enhanced student experience, assuring academic quality and contributing (sometimes delivering) key aspects of their provider’s strategic plan.

Emerging leaders find themselves sitting on committees, representing others, and championing particular topics, having listened to the views of their teams. For some these are new experiences, requiring support and encouragement from peers and senior leaders to embrace the opportunities and challenges.

These colleagues are often leaders of a team or group, responsible for delivering not only their personal objectives, but that of the collective group. Emerging in their leadership journey they are often new to people management, navigating the concept of developing others. Their skillset requirement is vast, their teams need them to listen to many voices and views, and synthesise this into priority areas for campaign.

Learning as leaders

Attention must be paid to those embracing leadership roles, ensuring they are supported to develop. There will inevitably be contextualised opportunities and challenges, requiring understanding of the provider, location, and/or disciplinary focus. Leaders must swiftly understand the context in which they operate, previous developments in topical matters, and the drivers of various stakeholders. We must make space for leaders to learn, providing opportunity to develop.

Emerging leaders learn through observation of senior or more established leaders, modelling behaviours and approaches, through peer networking, and crucially through experience. At different times, in different circumstances, the most beneficial learning opportunities will vary. Emerging leaders will be adaptable, recognising their own developmental need, seeking support and input based on their growing networks, and reflect on their own experiences as part of the learning journey.

Space and encouragement are needed to explore and experience leadership qualities, styles and approaches. Important qualities for all leaders in HE are highlighted here by Shân Wareing: curiosity, confidence, team work, clarity in complexity, and fearlessness.

Not as easy as it sounds

While they are learning to lead, their university requires understanding, interpretation and application of activity to ensure delivery of strategic priorities – which, as we know, aren’t always aligned to the voices and views they are being asked to represent.

Representing the views of others can be challenging, especially when a range of views need collating and presenting back to university management or the team from which they came. Colleague feedback provides leaders with the thoughts and opinions of those around them, through listening to what is being shared – and what isn’t.

Emerging leaders have to synthesise great volumes of information, pulling out the very core of an issue, articulating this back to others, making strategy understandable. Collating and considering the voices of others is important, but critically, as we know from experiences with students, we must keep those who have contributed informed about what may happen next as a result of their engagement. This can empower communities to recognise input, and demonstrates an appreciation of the value of shared views.

The views of colleagues do not always align to strategy or intended direction. In this space leaders develop heightened negotiation and articulation skills, an ability to represent strategic drivers as the mechanism for change, whilst recognising an interconnected web of views and opinions. Often responsible for the support and welfare of colleagues, they are mindful of the impact of decisions and actions on others.

Developed with experience is the ability to identify where and when swift intervention is required, or when a longer-term more measured approach is needed. Uncertainties, questions and challenges surround daily life. There are times when action is required without full knowledge of a situation, confidence and the support of your surrounding team are critical when the occasion arises.

Significant transformation

It’s widely recognised that higher education has experienced significant transformation in recent years. Emerging leaders in our sector must recognise what has gone before and seek to make the most of the opportunities and challenges to come. Transformation can be invigorating, but it also brings uncertainty, and if poorly managed can cause greater uncertainty, leading to more challenges, and so the cycle continues.

To avoid this, Catherine Moran summarises the skills required in three key principles for academic leadership. Leaders must be aware of what they are aiming for, and recognise it when achieved. Emerging leaders will develop the ability to be “present” in relationships with others, drawing on authentic skills of listening and inclusivity. And once a decision is reached, emerging leaders need to be accountable.

Emerging leaders play a vital role in HE, and must be supported to develop appropriate skills, attributes and behaviours. They are delivering strategic impact, leading teams, and enhancing the student and staff experience – let’s take a moment to ensure all those in leadership roles have the opportunity to develop and grow.

The author has written this piece as an emerging leader who has participated in Minerva’s Emerging Leadership Programme, and wishes to acknowledge the support and guidance received from Mary Stuart, Kerry Shepherd, Ben Tucker, and fellow programme participants, in shaping their emerging leadership journey.

Source link

February 28, 2025
Dear Colleague letter is lawless attack on DEI (opinion)

On Valentine’s Day, the Trump administration surprised schools and colleges with its newest attack on DEI and student body diversity. The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights released a Dear Colleague letter that warned schools and colleges that they may lose federal funding if they discriminate on the basis of race.

This letter revealed novel, unsupported legal theories regarding the application of federal civil rights laws to schools and colleges. In fact, OCR’s letter sweeps so broadly that it claims to prohibit certain considerations of race that remain perfectly legal under well-established legal doctrine.

While the threat of losing federal funding has been a facet of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act since its passage in 1964, the letter specifically takes aim at DEI programming as well as the use of “race as a factor in admissions, financial aid, hiring, training, and other institutional programming.”

Although the letter includes some correct statements of nondiscrimination law, OCR makes assertions that are troubling and unsupported by sound legal reasoning. As part of the team that wrote OCR’s guidance on this very issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, I am disturbed by how politics is driving policy guidance that will hurt educational institutions and students from kindergarten through college.

In describing the scope of SFFA, OCR’s latest guidance attempts to smuggle in a legal standard that appears nowhere in the court’s opinion. The letter states, “Relying on non-racial information as a proxy for race, and making decisions based on that information, violates the law … It would, for instance, be unlawful for an educational institution to eliminate standardized testing to achieve a desired racial balance or to increase racial diversity.”

Here, OCR baselessly claims that not only can colleges not consider race as a factor in admissions, they also cannot make race-neutral changes to admissions policies that help increase student body diversity—such as eliminating standardized testing. That claim falls firmly outside not only the bounds of SFFA but also the decades of Supreme Court case law that precede it.

In Grutter (2003), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor considers whether the University of Michigan Law School could use a lottery system for admissions. In Fisher (2016), Justice Anthony Kennedy implicitly approves of the Texas top 10 percent plan, perhaps the most well-known race-neutral strategy to increase racial diversity. And in SFFA (2023), the plaintiff’s briefs themselves include endorsements of possible race-neutral alternatives Harvard could have legally pursued such as adopting socioeconomic preferences in admissions.

Yet in its most recent letter, OCR attempts quite the head fake in its declaration that SFFA dictates that schools and colleges must abandon race-neutral strategies meant to increase student body diversity. While in reality SFFA says nothing about the permissibility of these race-neutral strategies, a separate line of cases tackles these legal questions head-on—and contradicts the Trump administration’s unfounded guidance.

In Coalition for TJ, Boston Parent Coalition and other recent cases, groups similar to Students for Fair Admissions have challenged changes to admissions policies of prestigious, selective high schools that were adopted in part to increase student body diversity. In some cases, the schools reconfigured weighting for standardized tests; in others, schools guaranteed that each feeding middle school gets a certain number of seats. In all of the cases, the school districts won. The position now advanced by OCR in its recent letter has failed to find footing in two courts of appeal. And just last year, the Supreme Court declined to further review the decisions in TJ and Boston.

What OCR attempts to do with its letter is extraordinary. It tries to advance a legal theory with support from a Supreme Court case that says nothing about the matter. At the same time, OCR ignores recent judicial opinions in cases that directly address this question.

Regardless of how legally infirm OCR’s proclamations are, schools and colleges will likely feel forced to comply. This could mean that the threat alone will lead schools and colleges to cut efforts to legally pursue racially diverse student bodies and racially inclusive campus environments. As a result, our nation’s classrooms and campuses will unfortunately look less like the communities that they sit in and serve, all because of shoddy policymaking and legal sleight of hand.

Ray Li is a civil rights attorney focusing on education policy. He recently left the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights after serving as a career attorney from 2021 to 2025. In that role, he worked on more than a dozen policy documents for OCR, including guidance issued after the Supreme Court’s decision in SFFA. He also served as OCR’s lead staff attorney on appellate and Supreme Court litigation matters, including for the SFFA, Coalition for TJ and Boston Parent Coalition cases. Prior to joining OCR, he advised schools, colleges and universities on legal regulatory issues, including civil rights issues, at Hogan Lovells’ education practice.

Source link

February 27, 2025
New research questions DOGE claims about ED cut savings

New research suggests that the Department of Government Efficiency has been making inaccurate claims about the extent of its savings from cuts to the Department of Education.

DOGE previously posted on X that it ended 89 contracts from the Education Department’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, worth $881 million. But an analysis released Wednesday by the left-wing think tank New America found that these contracts were worth about $676 million—roughly $200 million less than DOGE claimed. DOGE’s “Wall of Receipts” website, where it tracks its cuts, later suggested the savings from 104 Education Department contracts came out to a more modest $500 million.

New America also asserted that DOGE is losing money, given that the government had already spent almost $400 million on the now-terminated Institute of Education Sciences contracts, meaning those funds have gone to waste.

“Research cannot be undone, and statistics cannot be uncollected. Instead, they will likely sit on a computer somewhere untouched,” New America researchers wrote in a blog post about their findings.

In a separate analysis shared last week, the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, also called into question DOGE’s claims about its Education Department cuts.

Nat Malkus, senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, compared DOGE’s contract values with the department’s listed values and found they “seldom matched” and DOGE’s values were “always higher,” among other problems with DOGE’s data.

“DOGE has an unprecedented opportunity to cut waste and bloat,” Malkus said in a post about his research. “However, the sloppy work shown so far should give pause to even its most sympathetic defenders.”

Source link

February 27, 2025
To make profit, AI companies will have to take your job

Lately, I have been experiencing anger, occasionally edging toward rage (depending on my mood) when I open a new document in MSWord and I see the ghostly prompt urging me to use its Copilot generative AI tool.

I do not want to use this tool. I especially do not want to use this tool to start a draft of a document, because writing the first draft under the power of my own thoughts is the key to ultimately producing something someone else might want to read, and outcome on which my living depends, but it’s also, the point of all writing ever, in any context, as far as I’m concerned.

I am persuaded by Marc Watkins’s framing of “AI is unavoidable, not inevitable” for no other reason than the tech companies will not allow us to avoid their generative AI offerings. We can’t get away from this stuff if we want to, and boy, do I really want to.

But just because it is unavoidable and must be acknowledged and, in its way, dealt with, does not mean we are required to use or experiment with it. Over the period of writing More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, and now spending a month or so promoting and talking about the book in various venues, I grow more and more convinced that if this technology is to have utility in helping students learn—and I mean learn, not merely do school—this utility is likely to be specialized and narrow and the product of deep thought and careful exploration and step-by-step iteration.

Instead, we’re on the receiving end of a fire hose spraying, This is the future!

Is it, really?

One of the reasons we’re being told it’s the future is because at this time, generative AI has no strong business rationale. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who admitted in a podcast interview that generative AI applications have had no meaningful effect on GDP, suggesting they are not amazing engines of increased productivity.

Tech watcher Ed Zitron has been saying for months that there is no “AI revolution” and that we’re heading toward the bursting of a bubble that will at least rival the 2008 downturn caused by the subprime mortgage crisis.

So, while there is reason to believe that we are experiencing a bubble that is inevitably going to burst, as we imagine what our institutional and individual relationships should be with this technology, I think it’s useful to see what the people who are—literally—invested in AI envision for our futures. If they are right, and AI is inevitable, what awaits us?

Let’s check in with the people directly funding and developing AI technology what they foresee for the educators of the United States.

@elonmusk/X

That is the man who is apparently running—and running roughshod over—the United States government suggesting that AI-assisted education is superior to what teachers deliver. Now, we know this is not true. We know it will never be true—that is, unless what counts as outcomes is defined down to what AI-assisted education can deliver.

At her “Second Breakfast” newsletter, Audrey Watters puts it plainly, and we should be prepared to accept these truths:

“But to be clear, the ‘better outcomes’ that Silicon Valley shit-posters Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk fantasize about in the image above do not involve the quality of education—of learning or teaching or schooling. (You’re not fooled that they do, right?) They aren’t talking about improved test scores or stronger college admissions or nicer job prospects for graduates or well-compensated teachers or happier, healthier kids or any such metric. Rather, this is a call for AI to facilitate the destruction of the teaching profession, one that is, at the K-12 level comprised predominantly of women (and, in the U.S., is the largest union) and at the university level—in their imaginations, at least—is comprised predominantly of ‘woke.’”

It is hard to know what to do about a technology that some intend to leverage to destroy your profession and harm the constituents your profession is meant to serve. More Than Words is not a book that argues we must resist this technology at all costs, but again, these people want to destroy me, you, us.

ChatGPT and its ilk haven’t even been around for all that long, and we already see the consequences of voluntary deskilling. Futurism reports, “Young coders are using AI for everything, giving ‘blank stares’ when asked how programs actually work.”

Namanyay Goel, a veteran coder who has been observing the AI-wielding coders who can’t actually code, says, “The foundational knowledge that used to come from struggling through problems is just … missing.” This is output divorced from process, a pattern that is already endemic to our transactional model of schooling, but which AI now supercharges.

There is no role for educational institutions in the world where we allow this sort of thing to substitute for knowledge and learning. That may be the least of our problems should the full deskilling result. (See the film Idiocracy for that particular flavor of dystopia.)

When Microsoft shoves its AI tools in the face of a student with less time, less freedom, less confidence and more incentive to use it, what are we giving them to make them want to resist, to commit to their learning, to become something other than a meat puppet plugging syntax into a machine with the machine spewing more syntax out?

At this point, where is the evidence the companies do not wish us harm?

Source link

February 27, 2025
Your alumni magazine is a source of marketing gold

In a time of skyrocketing paper and postage costs, alumni magazines are paradoxically enjoying a renaissance. After cutting back—or cutting down—print issues during the pandemic, many institutions are now pushing for expanded page counts, more copies, better photography, multimedia extras and more institutional support.

Why?

Because audiences appreciate the thought-provoking content and the tangible, premium reminder of the enduring connection with their alma mater. In a 2024 CASE readership survey, 68 percent of TCU Magazine’s readers reported spending 30 minutes or more with every issue. Almost half reported that the magazine was a go-to source for continuing education.

Journalists are pouring their passion and experience into institutional magazines because higher education shines glimmers of hope into an increasingly dark world. They highlight purpose-driven students who will tackle the problems of the future and brilliant faculty whose research is providing innovative solutions to the planet’s most pressing challenges.

Our readership analytics at TCU Magazine have long shown a strong audience appetite for well-researched and carefully written and edited feature stories about forward momentum and its relationship to education. Since 2015, our overall page views have experienced an astounding 1,300 percent growth. That number sounds outlandish, but I can assure you it is accurate.

Our alumni, parents, donors and internal stakeholders are and always have been the primary audiences. But they aren’t the only people who want to know about the students, faculty, staff and initiatives that thrive on our campus. TCU Magazine’s stories are crafted to be relevant far beyond our campus community and long after the initial date of publication.

In 2021, when all the rules were being rewritten, we proposed a partnership with our colleagues in marketing. We suggested a trial run of using existing magazine stories as peer marketing material, promoting those features to internet users who live in the proximity of the country’s top 150 colleges and universities. The goal was for other professionals in higher education to learn about TCU beyond our exceptional student experience and athletic success.

TCU’s marketing director agreed that long-form content could run alongside more traditional digital marketing materials. Why not? Serving stories about improving teacher retirement plans; developing free, open-source digital mapping tools; or better understanding mutations in the BRCA gene benefit us and all manner of readers.

Audiences learn something new and interesting about how research is shaping the future, and we achieve our goal of enhancing TCU’s academic reputation.

Win-win.

Together, we built a partnership with a digital marketing agency based in Fort Worth. With their expert guidance, we got a crash course in the differences between Google Display Network and SEM keywords, Demand Gen ad placements, bidding strategies, and the wisdom of narrowing ad placements in social media feeds.

We launched our first joint academic content campaign in April 2021 with a modest investment. The results were promising: In two months, we got the TCU initials in front of more than six million people around the country and enticed 87,000 of those people to click on the ad and come to the website to read the story.

Best of all, these were what we refer to as quality clicks, because the average reader spent almost two minutes on one of our stories, far above the internet’s long-form content average of less than 40 seconds. That small trial convinced our divisional leaders that magazine material could be marketing gold.

We didn’t need to reinvent the wheel or invest in outside development of marketing-specific content because we had a treasure trove already flowing from a steady creative stream inside our office.

We expanded the efforts in 2022, sharing new stories with 10.5 million pairs of eyes and bringing 116,000 more people to our site to learn about TCU research. That year, we got an email from Puerto Rico about French professor Benjamin Ireland’s research reuniting families torn apart during forced internment during World War II. “I am not sure why Facebook ‘promoted’ your article to me this morning,” the effusive author shared, “but something made me click to read more.”

We’ve continued to grow these campaigns. Though our mission at the magazine is and always will be to serve the TCU community first, we now factor in whether a proposed story might have a broader impact or might help us tell a more expansive tale about how the type of ethical leadership that flourishes here and makes the world a better place.

My opinion is that these campaigns have worked because they’re a perfect merger of marketing and communication. We’re doing what magazine writers and editors have always done—telling authentic stories about real people doing purpose-driven work.

What’s not to like?

Caroline Collier is director of editorial services at Texas Christian University and editor of TCU Magazine.

Source link

February 27, 2025