Tag: Higher

Satirical Essay on Restructuring Humanities (opinion)
The administration at U of All People has suffered long enough with the underperforming School of Social Sciences and Humanities. Its various departments, programs and whatnot have grown arcane to the point where the students themselves no longer understand the difference between, say, philosophy and psychology, save that both begin with the letter p. And since many students no longer engage in reading or writing without the aid of AI, we should stop supporting distinct majors that encourage both. Consequently, we are restructuring the school to reflect the current dictates of academic administration.

Here are some issues we have made up to justify the restructuring:
- There has been a recent decrease in enrollment, or at least there ought to have been.
- These are perilous times for the humanities, and smushing them together will help.
- Merging departments will make the infrastructure more economical, particularly if we do away with pesky department offices and office staff.
- Just saying the word “interdisciplinary” makes us feel connected to the 21st century.
SSSH currently includes English, history, philosophy, religion, sociology, anthropology, modern languages, linguistics, political science, psychology, classics and several others that may have escaped our notice. However, we have hired a consultancy firm that can list them all. Already, the consultants have put together a PowerPoint presentation advising what they have inferred we want.

The restructuring will feature programs such as philohistenglish-religiosophy (PHER), anthrosociopsychology (ASP) and perhaps two other smushes with better acronyms. The new, flexible majors may be grouped under the Program for (Somewhat Limited Freedom of) Speech, the Program for Global Awareness of What Trouble We’re In and the Program That Resembles a Grab Bag From a Kids’ Party. Instead of a bunch of quarrelsome department heads and a dean, a triumvirate of armed SSSH administrators will be responsible for keeping the peace.

We have already polled the faculty and students in a metric calculated to prove our point: On a scale of one to 10, please rate how dissatisfied you are with the current setup, with one being “very” and 10 being “extremely.” The 12 respondents answered that they were very dissatisfied. Note that we are perfectly willing to listen to suggestions from the faculty and in fact have invited them all to attend a feedback session to take place yesterday at 3 a.m. in the Student Center Ballroom (bring your own flashlight!). However, we urge the faculty not to think outside the box we have placed them in while also being nimble when it comes to downsizing.

During this process, the SSSH building itself, shabby compared to the shiny new STEM complex, will be restructured, possibly to a multilevel parking garage with spots reserved for U of All People administrators. It has also been suggested that the faculty themselves could use some restructuring, starting with their mouths, which can be sealed through a painless surgical procedure.

Don’t think of it as a loss of autonomy and shared governance. Consider it a gain for this administration!

David Galef is a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University. His latest book is the novel Where I Went Wrong (Regal House, 2025).
Source link
July 11, 2025
Student-Led Teaching Doesn’t Help Underprepared Students

New research finds peer instruction models may be less impactful for students with lower standardized test scores than their higher-achieving peers.

miodrag ignjatovic/E+/Getty Images

Introductory STEM courses serve as a gatekeeper for students interested in majors or careers in STEM fields, and students from less privileged backgrounds are often less likely to succeed in those courses.

As a result, researchers have explored what practices can make a difference in student outcomes in such courses, including creating sections with diverse student populations and offering grade forgiveness for students who performed poorly.

A recent research article from the University of Texas at Austin examined the role peer instructors play in helping students from a variety of backgrounds. Researchers discovered that students who were enrolled in an interactive peer-led physics course section had worse learning outcomes and grades than their peers in a lecture section taught by an instructor. Students with lower SAT scores were also less likely to achieve a high grade in the student-taught class.

The research: Historically, instructors teaching STEM courses have delivered content through lectures, with students taking a largely passive role, according to the paper. However, more active learning environments have been tied to higher student engagement and are largely preferred by learners. A May 2024 Student Voice survey by Inside Higher Ed found that 44 percent of respondents said an interactive lecture format helps them learn and retain information best, compared to 25 percent who selected traditional lectures.

Interactive lectures can include instructors asking students questions throughout the class period or creating opportunities for them to reflect on course material, according to the paper. Peer instruction is touted as an effective means of flipped classroom teaching, requiring students to finish readings prior to class and reserving class time for interactive activities.

While previous studies show the value of peer-led courses, much of that research focused on selective, private institutions, where students may have more similar backgrounds or levels of academic preparation, according to the authors of the new study.

So researchers designed a study that would compare apples to apples: They looked at the outcomes for students learning physics in one course section taught by a professor versus one taught by fellow students to see which had a greater impact.

The results: The paper analyzed the learning outcomes of two sections of students in an introductory mechanics course at a large public institution over three years. One section of the course was taught by a peer instructor, mostly in a small-group discussion format. The other section was taught by the professor using interactive lectures.

Students completed identical homework and midterm exams on the same days and had the opportunity to attend identical tutoring sessions supported by teaching assistants.

Though the course is designed for physics and astronomy majors, students from other majors participated as well. Each section had between 41 and 82 students, for a total of 367 students taking the course over three years.

Not only did students in the peer-instruction section have lower grades, but students who had lower SAT scores from high school were less likely to demonstrate learning in fundamental concepts, as well as less likely to earn an A, compared to their peers with similar test scores taught by a professor. However, students with higher SAT scores made smaller gains (less dramatic grade increases or learning demonstrated) in the lecture section compared to students taught by peers, which researchers believe could mean that students with less academic preparation may benefit more from an instructor-led course, while their peers who had a high achievement history in high school could thrive more in a peer-led section.

The analysis does not provide an explanation for why these differences exist, but researchers theorized that group work or peer dependency could result in some students being less knowledgeable about content matter because they trust others in the class to answer correctly. Creating postdiscussion follow-up questions can lessen this learning gap.

We bet your colleague would like this article, too. Send them this link to subscribe to our newsletter on Student Success.

Source link

July 11, 2025
Federal Policy Uncertainty Impacting College Budgeting

Economic uncertainty—the kind that dominated headlines for the first half of 2025—makes long-term financial planning difficult. But nearly two in three college and university chief business officers say that uncertainty surrounding federal policy for higher education is hindering their ability to conduct even basic financial planning. That’s according to Inside Higher Ed’s forthcoming annual survey of CBOs with Hanover Research.

“Higher education has not faced this level of financial uncertainty in generations,” said Robert Kelchen, chair of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who reviewed preliminary survey data.

While recent history offers one comparison—the early days of the pandemic, when uncertainty was similarly “off the charts”—the federal government at that time “quickly stepped in to provide support,” Kelchen continued. Today, by contrast, the federal government “is causing the uncertainty.”

According to the survey, federal policy uncertainty under the second Trump administration is moderately impacting basic financial planning at 49 percent of institutions represented, meaning that challenges have arisen but CBOs and their colleagues have managed to adapt. Another 14 percent of institutions are severely impacted, meaning basic financial planning has been extremely difficult, leading to major disruptions. This is consistent across sectors.

The survey was fielded in April and May, with CBOs from 169 institutions, public and private nonprofit, associate to doctoral degree–granting, responding. The full 2025 Survey of College and University Chief Business Officers will be released later this month. It includes additional findings on the second Trump administration’s impact on institutional finances so far, mergers and acquisitions, value and affordability, and more.

CBOs see federal student aid policy changes as a major risk, with 68 percent citing this as a top federal policy concern from a longer list of options. A distant second: research funding levels, cited by 24 percent of all CBOs. Public institution CBOs are relatively more concerned about research funding, at 36 percent versus 9 percent of private nonprofit peers.

Questions about the future of federal student aid come on top of last year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid fiasco. And nearly four in 10 surveyed CBOs (38 percent) report having already experienced significant to severe disruptions related to that FAFSA rollout.

In Kelchen’s assessment, there’s no guarantee that the federal financial aid system will work as intended this fall—especially for colleges that require additional oversight before receiving funds, given recent mass layoffs at the U.S. Education Department. Congress also last week passed what he described as the largest set of changes to federal higher education policy in decades, via the Trump-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, with potential “downstream effects for state budgets due to cuts to federal benefits.”

Throw in cuts to federal research funding and big changes for international students, and colleges’ budgets “are highly uncertain,” Kelchen said.

Case in point: Michigan State University president Kevin Guskiewicz recently announced a plan to cut spending, including faculty and staff positions. He blamed expectations that the university will receive “less money from the federal government due to research cuts and restrictions on international enrollments, although the magnitude of those impacts is uncertain.” Also at play: increasing operating costs and state budget concerns.

In another example of uncertainty in action, Val Smith, president of Swarthmore College, announced in late May that the institution’s Board of Managers had been unable to carry out “one of its primary fiduciary responsibilities: approving the college’s operating budget,” at least as usual. Given the “confluence of uncertainties we currently face,” she said at the time, the board moved forward with an interim operating budget for the first three months of the new fiscal year. It plans to revisit and adopt a full operating budget in the fall, “when we expect to have more clarity.”

To Kelchen, interim budgets such as Swarthmore’s can make sense if revenues are “highly volatile.” So he said he wouldn’t be surprised if other institutions were quietly making similar moves.

In an additional expression of uncertainty, most surveyed CBOs describe the impact of the second Trump administration’s policies on their institution’s financial outlook—both current and over the next 12 months—as somewhat or very negative.

Most CBOs report minimal federal funding cuts under Trump so far. A handful do indicate that their funding has been reduced significantly, by more than 10 percent. An additional 11 percent report that funding has been reduced by 5 to 10 percent. And about as many aren’t sure. But the rest say funding has decreased by less than 5 percent or stayed consistent.

While the ultimate impact of federal policy changes remains to be seen—and will look different at different institutions—strategist Rebeka Mazzone advised frequent collaboration and communication between CBOs and other cabinet-level leaders, “so that you always know what’s happening on a more real-time basis.”

Also critical: forecasting, or “having a tool that allows you to constantly update the dollars you have so that you understand the impact.” Mazzone, founder of FuturED Finance, said that this real-time process is underused and very different from typical budgeting, in a which a yearlong spending plan is developed based on a particular moment in time. But the “smaller and the more cash-strapped the institution is, the more important the forecast becomes.”

Fancy software isn’t necessary, she said, as forecasting can happen on a spreadsheet. What matters is “capturing changes and overlaying them on the budget so that you understand where you’re going to end the year, and that helps you to more proactively manage the outcomes.”

Another important tool? Five-year projections. “If you have lower enrollment this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years. If you have a higher discount rate this year, that is going to affect you also for the next three years.” So when institutions “suddenly” close, Mazzone said, “it’s not so sudden. They just weren’t using these tools to really understand how bad things were—and how quickly things were heading in the wrong direction.”

To Mazzone’s point, while federal policy uncertainty is challenging short-term planning, many institutions now making budget cuts have significant underlying issues.

What’s Kelchen’s advice for colleges and universities struggling with present uncertainty—including those navigating longer-term financial woes? Prepare multiple budget scenarios “ranging from something close to business as usual to the possibility of losing most federal funding.”

Institutions will get “some answers on what actual revenues look like as the start of a new academic year draws nearer, but this will take time,” he said. Those in stronger positions can “operate more at business as usual and absorb losses if needed. But if there is underlying weakness, colleges need to budget for the worst right now and hope for something better.”

Source link

July 11, 2025
Avoiding Work Has Always Been Part of College. This Is New.

In a recent piece in The New Yorker, “What Happens After AI Destroys College Writing?,” Hua Hsu tells a story that will be familiar to anyone working in higher education: students wrestling—to varying degrees—about when and how to use generative AI tools like ChatGPT in the completion of their schoolwork.

There is a range of approaches and opinions among students—as there must be, as students are not a monolith—but Hsu centers the piece around “Alex,” an NYU student with a future goal to become a CPA who makes extensive and, to his mind, strategic use of these tools in various aspects of his life, including in writing the emails he exchanged with Hsu to arrange the interview for the piece.

Alex walks Hsu through his use of Claude to first crunch an article on Robert Wedderburn (a 19th-century Jamaican abolitionist) into a summary, and then, when the summary was longer than he had time to absorb before class, to reduce it to bullet points that he then transcribed into a notebook since his professor didn’t allow computers in class.

In a more elaborate example, Alex also used it to complete an art history assignment rooted in a visit to a museum exhibition, where he took pictures of the works and wall text and then fed it all into Claude.

His rationale, as told to Hsu, was “I’m trying to do the least work possible, because this is a class I’m not hella fucking with.”

At the end of the article, we check in with Alex on his finals. Alex “estimated he’d spent between thirty minutes and an hour composing two papers for his humanities classes,” something that would’ve taken “eight or nine hours” without Claude. Alex told Hsu, “I didn’t retain anything. I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.”

Hsu then delivers the kicker: “He received an A-minus and a B-plus.”

I mean this without offense to Hsu, an accomplished writer (New Yorker staff writer and author of the best-selling memoir Stay True) and professor at Bard College, but the piece, for all its specifics and color, felt like very old news—to me, at least.

The transactional mindset toward education, something I’ve been writing about for years, is on perfect display in Alex’s actions. Generative AI has merely made this more plain, more common and more troubling, since there aren’t even any hoops to jump through in order to fake engagement. Alex is doing nothing (or nearly so) and earning credits from New York University.

On reflection, though, the story of Alex is even older than I thought, since it was also my story, particularly the line “I’m trying to do the least work possible,” which was very much my experience for significant chunks of my own college experience from 1988 to 1992.

I earned quite a few credits in my time for, if not doing nothing, certainly learning nothing. Or not learning the subject for which I’d earned the credits, anyway.

How could I blame a student of today for adopting the attitude that I lived by? With my own students, when I was teaching college, I often made hay from my lackluster undergraduate performance, talking about how I skipped more than 70 percent of my class meetings second semester of freshman year but still received no grade lower than a B.

In the article, Hsu remarks that “None of the students I spoke with seemed lazy or passive.” The students “worked hard—but part of their effort went to editing out anything in their college experiences that felt extraneous. They were radically resourceful.”

I, on the other hand, at least when it came to the school part of college, was resolutely lazy and largely passive, except when it came to making sure to avoid courses I was not interested in—essentially anything outside of reading and writing—or that had a mode of assessment not suited to my skills.

My preferred structure was a lecture or lecture/discussion with in-class essay exams and/or short response papers geared to specific texts. Exams and research papers were to be avoided, because exams required studying and research papers required … research.

If you let me loose on a reading or a few chapters from a textbook, I had no trouble giving something that resembled a student doing college, even though the end result was very much akin to Alex’s. I didn’t retain anything.

But hindsight says I learned a lot—or learned enough, anyway, through the classes I was interested in and, perhaps more importantly, the noncurricular experiences of college.

While there are some similarities between my and Alex’s mindset vis-à-vis college, there is a significant difference. Alex appears to be acting out of an “optimization” mindset, where he focuses his efforts on what is most “relevant,” presumably to his future interests, like employment and monetary earnings.

I, on the other hand, majored in the “extraneous experiences.” I was pretty dedicated to the lacrosse club, showing up for practice five days a week with games on the weekend, but I also recall a game day following my 21st birthday when I was so hungover (and perhaps still drunk) that you could smell the alcohol oozing from my pores. My shifts in the midfield were half the length of my line mates’.

(That was the last time I got that drunk.)

I recall a contest at my fraternity where the challenge was to gain the most weight within an 18-hour period, during which we stuffed ourselves with spaghetti, Italian bread, chocolate pudding and gallons of water until we were sick and bloated. Another time we ground through an entire season of Nintendo Super Tecmo Bowl football over the span of a few days, skipping class if you had a matchup that needed playing. We had a group of regulars who gathered in my room to watch All My Children and General Hospital most weekdays. I am the least successful of that crew by a fair stretch.

I know that I took courses in economics, geography, Asian studies and Russian history where, like Alex, I retained virtually nothing about the course material even days after the courses, when I crammed for a test or bs’ed my way through a paper to get my B and move on to what I wanted to spend my time on.

From my perspective as a middle-aged person whose life has been significantly enhanced by all the ways I dodged schoolwork while I was in college, including spending inordinate amounts of time with the woman to whom I have been married for 25 years this August, I would say that missing out on those classes to make room for experiences was the right thing to do.

(Even though I had no understanding of this at the time.)

Will Alex look back and feel the same?

So many questions that need exploring:

Would Alex be as appalled by my indigence, my failure at optimization, as I am by his ignorance?

Have we lost our belief that we as humans have agency over this world of technology?

Is Alex actively deskilling himself, or am I failing to develop the skills necessary for surviving in the world we’ve made for students like Alex?

I wonder if Alex and I have different definitions of what it is to survive.

Source link

July 11, 2025
Polly Trottenberg | Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

Polly TrottenbergPolly Trottenberg—a former Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) and Commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation (NYCDOT), and a nationally recognized authority on transportation, infrastructure, and public policy and management—has been named dean of the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and a Global Distinguished Professor at NYU.

Trottenberg takes up her new duties on August 1, 2025.

From April 2021 until January 2025, Trottenberg served as the Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Transportation, making her the chief operating officer of a 57,000-person federal agency, where she helped oversee hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments in roads, bridges, transit, passenger and freight rail, airports and ports. Trottenberg also served in 2023 as the Acting Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, the federal government’s largest and most complex 24/7 operational agency, with 44,000 employees and hundreds of facilities across the US and overseas. Prior to USDOT, Trottenberg served for seven years as New York City’s Transportation Commissioner, steering the 5,800-person agency through an era of growth and innovation, as well as the challenges of COVID. She led the City’s Vision Zero initiative, the first in the US, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and data-driven effort to reduce roadway fatalities. NYCDOT operates one of the US’s largest urban transportation systems, with 6,000 miles of roads, nearly 800 bridges, the nation’s largest traffic operation and parking system, the Staten Island Ferry, and extensive bicycle, pedestrian, and public plaza infrastructure. Between 2009 and 2014, she served first as Assistant Secretary and later Undersecretary of Transportation Policy at the USDOT. She previously spent 12 years on Capitol Hill, which was preceded by two years at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Trottenberg received her BA in history from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and her MPP from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Source link

July 11, 2025
It is high time higher education adopted a harm reduction approach to drug use among students

While Gen Z is showing less interest in the normalised alcohol and drug excess that dogged their preceding generations, England and Wales’ most recent stats confirmed that 16.5 per cent of people aged between 16 to 24-years-old took an illegal drug in the last year.

Additionally, a 2024 report by Universities UK found that 18 per cent of students have used a drug in the past with 12 per cent imbibing across the previous 12 months. With a UK student population of 2.9m, this suggests the drug-savvy portion is around 348,000 to 522,000 people.

It’s prudent, therefore, for anyone involved within student safety provision to know that the UK is currently mired in a drug death crisis – a record 5,448 fatalities were recorded in England and Wales in the most recent statistics, while Scotland had 1,172, the highest rate of drug deaths in Europe.

In an attempt to ameliorate some of this risk, seven UK universities recently took delivery of nitazene strips to distribute among students, facilitated by the charity Students Organising for Sustainability (SOS-UK). These instant testing kits – not dissimilar to a Covid-19 lateral flow test in appearance – examine pills or powders for nitazenes: a class of often deadly synthetic opioids linked with 458 UK deaths between July 2023 and December 2024.

While these fatalities will have most likely been amongst older, habitual users of heroin or fake prescription medicines, these strips form part of a suite of innovative solutions aimed at helping students stay safe(r) if they do choose to use drugs.

The 2024 Universities UK report suggested drug checking and education as an option in reducing drug-related harm, and recommended a harm reduction approach, adding: “A harm reduction approach does not involve condoning or seeking to normalise the use of drugs. Instead, it aims to minimise the harms which may occur if students take drugs.”

With that in mind, let’s consider a world where harm reduction – instead of zero tolerance – is the de facto policy and how drug checking or drug testing plays a part in that.

Drug checking and drug testing

Drug checking and drug testing are terms that often get used interchangeably but have different meanings. Someone using a drug checking service can get expert lab-level substance analysis, for contents and potency, then a confidential consultation on these results during which they receive harm reduction advice. In the UK, this service is offered by The Loop, a non-profit NGO that piloted drug checking at festivals in 2016 and now have a monthly city centre service in Bristol.

Drug testing can take different forms. First, there is the analysis of a biological sample to detect whether a person has taken drugs, typically done in a workplace or medical setting. There are also UK-based laboratories offering substance analysis, that then gets relaid to the public in different ways.

WEDINOS is an anonymous service, run by Public Health Wales since 2013, where users send a small sample of their substance alongside a downloadable form. After testing, WEDINOS posts the results on their website (in regards to content but not potency) normally within a few weeks.

MANDRAKE is a laboratory operating out of Manchester Metropolitan University. It works in conjunction with key local stakeholders to test found or seized substances in the area. It is often first with news regarding adulterated batches of drugs or dangerously high-strength substances on the market.

Domestic testing is also possible with reagents tests. These are legally acquired chemical compounds that change colour when exposed to specific drugs and can be used at home. They can provide valuable information as to the composition of a pill or powder but do not provide information on potency. The seven UK universities that took delivery of nitazene strips were already offering reagents kits to students as part of their harm reduction rationale.

Although the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 specifies that certain activities must not be allowed to take place within a university setting, the Universities UK report argued that universities have some discretion on how to manage this requirement. Specifically, it stated: “The law does not require universities to adopt a zero tolerance approach to student drug use.”

How to dispense testing apparatus

The mechanisms differ slightly between SUs but have broad similarities. We spoke with Newcastle and Leeds (NUSU and LUU) who both offer Reagent Tests UK reagent testing kits, fentanyl strips and now nitazene strips. Reagent’s UK kits do not test for either of these two synthetic opioids. They vary in strength compared to heroin – and there are multiple analogues of nitazene that vary in potency – but an established ballpark figure is at least 50 times as strong.

All kits and tests are free. Newcastle’s are available from the Welfare and Support centre, in an area where students would have to take part in an informal chat with a member of staff to procure a kit. “We won’t ask for personal details. However, we do monitor this and will check in with a welfare chat if we think this would be helpful,” says Kay Hattam, Wellbeing and Safeguarding Specialist at NUSU. At Leeds, they’re available from the Advice Office and no meeting is required to collect a kit.

Harm reduction material is offered alongside the kits. “We have developed messaging to accompany kits which is clear on the limitations of drug testing, and that testing does not make drugs safe to use,” says Leeds University Union.

Before the donation, kits were both paid for by the respective unions and neither formally collected data on the results. Both SUs both make clear that offering these kits is not an encouragement of drug use. Kay Hattam draws an analogy: “If someone was eating fast food every day and I mentioned ways to reduce the risks associated with this, would they feel encouraged to eat more? I would think not. But it might make them think more about the risks.”

You’ll only encourage them

In 2022, in a report for HEPI, Arda Ozcubukcu and Graham Towl argued, “Drug use matters may be much more helpfully integrated into mental health and wellbeing strategies, rather than being viewed as a predominantly criminal justice issue.”

The evidence backs up the view that a harm reduction approach does not encourage drug use. A 2021 report authored by The Loop’s co-founder Fiona Measham, Professor in Criminology at the University of Liverpool, found that over half of The Loop’s users disposed of a substance that tested differently to their intended purchase, reducing the risk of poisoning. Additionally, three months after checking their drugs at a festival, around 30 per cent of users reported being more careful about polydrug use (mixing substances). One in five users were taking smaller doses of drugs overall. Not only does this demonstrate that better knowledge reduces risk of poisoning in the short-term, but it also has enduring positive impacts on drug-using behaviours.

SOS-UK has developed the Drug and Alcohol Impact scheme with 16 universities and students’ unions participating. This programme supports institutions in implementing the Universities UK guidance by using a variety of approaches to educate and support students in a non-stigmatising manner.

Alongside them is SafeCourse, a charity founded by Hilton Mervis after his son Daniel, an Oxford University student, died from an overdose in 2019. The charity – which counts the High Court judge Sir Robin Knowles and John de Pury, who led the development of the 2024 sector harm reduction framework, among its trustees – is working to encourage universities to move away from zero tolerance.This is through various means, including commissioning legal advice to provide greater clarity on universities’ liability if they are not adopting best practice, and checking in one year on from the Universities UK report, to ascertain how they’re adapting to the new era of harm reduction.

SafeCourse takes the view that universities must not allow themselves to be caught up prosecuting a failed war on drugs when their focus should be student safety, wellbeing and success. A harm reduction approach is the best way of achieving those ends.

Source link

July 10, 2025
Higher education postcard: Corpus Christi, Cambridge
Greetings from Cambridge!

The large majority of the old Oxbridge colleges were founded by rich and powerful individuals. One exception to that rule is Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. This was instead founded by (some of) the townspeople of Cambridge, and specifically by the Guild of Corpus Christi and the Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Its mission was to train priests, in a town and country shocked by the impact of the Black Death. And one particular benefactor was notable: Margaret Andrew, who died in 1349 and gave lands to both guilds.

What was a guild? There’s a fabulously helpful website which discusses their origin in Suffolk, and as Cambridge is next door there might not be too much difference. I’ll summarise: the word comes from the Old English term frith-gilds, associations of ten townsmen or villagers, and date from the 800s. These initially were to help enforce the peace – a medieval neighbourhood watch, if you like – but over time their character changed to take on a religious role and to act as a mutual insurance club of sorts, enabling people to have decent funerals, and celebrate saints days and the like. All of this was to help the members spend less time in purgatory after death.

Guilds became associated with specific saints and, later, with specific parish churches. The Guild of the Blessed Virgin Mary probably doesn’t need much explanation. Guilds of Corpus Christi became popular following Pope Urban IV’s founding of the feast of Corpus Christi (the body of Christ) in 1264. Indulgences – get out of purgatory free cards – were granted to those who celebrated it, and so gilds began to be formed to do so.

The love affair between the towns and the college didn’t last long. 1381 was the year of the Peasant’s Revolt, which was very active in East Anglia and Essex, Cambridge’s next-door counties. And in that year a mob from the town led by the mayor of Cambridge ransacked the college, burning books and causing mayhem, in protest against the college’s rapacious behaviour as a landlord. The specific crime was to enforce candle rents – charges payable based upon the number of candles or wax tapers present in their tenants’ homes. And in a broader context of revolt against authority, grievances would easy have been used to fan the flames.

At this time the college, although formally known as The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary in the University of Cambridge, was referred to as Bene’t College or Benet Hall. This was because it used the neighbouring St Bene’t’s Church until in 1577 it got its own chapel. Bene’t is short for Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, by the way.

The 1500s were notable for the college for other reasons too. In 1544, Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries was in full flow. The college’s master, Matthew Parker, obtained Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from several, and left them to the college, making the core of the Parker collection, of which the college is, reasonably, very proud.

In 1569 Queen Elizabeth I imposed a master upon the fellows of the college, removing for a while their right to elect a master. In 1573 the college imposed new rules requiring that Latin, not English, be spoken by scholars during full term. The punishment for transgression was being “beaten at the Buttery hatch”, which sounds both unpleasant and like a top quality innuendo. (Imagine Kenneth Williams saying it while playing Thomas Cromwell in Carry On Henry and try not to smile.)

We saw earlier that the college was founded just after the Black Death; and in 1630 another visitation of the plague took place. It seems that everyone in the college fled, except the master, a Dr Butts, who stayed behind to try to organise relief. The strain of it all was too much: he was found in 1632, having hanged himself.

During the Civil War the Oxbridge colleges – rich foundations with collections of silver – often gave their wealth to one side or the other. Presumably under duress. Corpus Christi bucked this trend, by giving fellows leave of absence, and asking them to take some of the college silver with them for safekeeping, just as someone has to take the primary school hamster home to be looked after over the school holidays. And that is why Corpus Christi’s silverware collection is better than many other colleges today.

The centuries rolled by, as they do. There were new buildings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and college life continued. The nineteenth century saw some evangelical zeal, but the number of students was also falling. Until 1906 Corpus Christi had always been led by a clergyman; the appointment of Robert Townley Caldwell as master. He was a colonel, commanding the 3rd battalion of the Gordon Highlanders in the mid-1890s, and a prominent freemason. He combined this with a career as a mathematician at Corpus Christi. His innovation was to change the policy on recruitment, so that it no longer focused on students who were, or wished to become, clergy. And accordingly the college began to grow again.

In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson announced their discovery of the double helix at The Eagle, which was – and still is – owned by the College. And the college became co-educational in 1980.

Notable alumni include:
- Christopher Marlowe, who arrived as a scholar at the college in 1580. His mysterious absences and high Buttery bills only add to the suggestion of his intelligence work, alongside his playwrightry (and yes, this is a proper word)
- Basil Henry Liddell Hart, soldier, military historian – especially of the first world war – and theorist
- E P Thompson, historian and titan of the left
- Neil Hamilton, disgraced former politician and minor celebrity.
The college has a splendid history on its website, which has informed much (but not all!) of this blog.

And finally, here’s a jigsaw of the card – enjoy!
Source link
July 10, 2025
ED Won’t Fund CTE, Dual Enrollment for “Illegal” Students

The Education Department said Thursday that federal money shouldn’t fund dual enrollment, adult education and certain career and technical education for “illegal alien” students, whether they’re adults or K–12 pupils who are accessing postsecondary education.

Department officials said in a news release that they are rescinding parts of a 1997 Dear Colleague letter that had allowed undocumented students to access those programs.

In the interpretative rule published on the Federal Register, the department declared that “non-qualified alien adults are not permitted to receive education benefits (postsecondary education benefits or otherwise) and non-qualified alien children are not eligible to receive postsecondary education benefits and certain other education benefits, so long as such benefits are not basic public education benefits. Postsecondary education benefits include dual enrollment and other similar early college programs.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in the release that “under President Trump’s leadership, hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities. The department will ensure that taxpayer funds are reserved for citizens and individuals who have entered our country through legal means who meet federal eligibility criteria.”

Augustus Mays, vice president of partnerships and engagement at EdTrust, an education equity group, said in a statement that the change “derails individual aspirations and undercuts workforce development at a time when our nation is facing labor shortages in critical fields like healthcare, education, and skilled trades. This decision raises barriers even higher for undocumented students who are already barred from accessing federal financial aid like Pell Grants and student loans.

“Across the country, we’re seeing migrant communities targeted with sweeping raids, amplified surveillance, and fear-based rhetoric designed to divide and dehumanize,” Mays said. “Policies like this don’t exist in a vacuum. They are rooted in a political agenda that scapegoats immigrants and uses fear to strip rights and resources from the most vulnerable among us.”

Source link

July 10, 2025
Hiring With Your Head—and Your Gut (opinion)
We’ve all been there: sitting on a search committee, sifting through credentials, interview notes and teaching demos, trying to decide whom to bring into our academic community. We talk about fit, collegiality and the balance between teaching and research. We refer to the rubric, the required qualifications and the preferred ones. We weigh experiences, diversity, alignment with the mission and potential.

And sometimes, quietly and without warning, we feel that small, subtle shift in our gut that says something doesn’t align.

For me, it happened during a campus interview years ago. The candidate had strong materials, solid experience and a warm, engaging manner. Throughout the formal interview, they said all the right things. Faculty were cautiously optimistic. But as I drove the candidate to the airport at the end of the visit, something changed. They relaxed, as anyone would, and for a brief second, I saw something in their eyes. A flash of disdain, maybe. Something sharper than the persona we had seen earlier. It was a shift in energy. A flicker of incongruence between how they had presented themselves and how they now carried themselves.

I put the feeling aside. After all, it was just a second. A moment. Something I couldn’t explain. Was I reading too much into it? Was I being unfair?

Later, I reflected on smaller details from their candidacy that had already made me pause. Their responses to scheduling emails had been brief and slow, lacking the warmth or curiosity I’d seen from other candidates. These weren’t red flags on their own, but together they created a subtle unease.

At the time, I was a relatively new assistant professor. I didn’t have the language or the authority to raise what I sensed in a meaningful way. And so, I said nothing.

Looking back, I now realize I could have simply asked a question like, “Did anyone else notice anything that felt a little different or off in our less formal moments with the candidate?” or “How did the candidate’s tone and energy feel during the downtimes between scheduled sessions?” These aren’t accusations—they’re openings for reflection. Questions like these can invite others to surface what they might have noticed but hadn’t yet verbalized.

Gut Feeling Meets Emotional Intelligence

Intuition doesn’t have to be the enemy of process. In fact, it can be part of an emotionally intelligent hiring culture—one that’s reflective, discerning and transparent. Emotional intelligence in this context is about being attuned to the human elements of a candidate’s fit. When we notice a gut reaction—whether it’s a spark of enthusiasm or a twinge of concern—it often stems from that attunement. What we call a “gut feeling” is frequently our mind’s quick synthesis of subtle cues, from body language to tone, guided by our own experiences and values.

Emotional intelligence in faculty hiring begins with self-awareness: tuning in to how a candidate’s presence affects you—whether through curiosity, ease or discomfort—and asking what your reactions might be signaling. It includes social awareness, noticing how others respond in informal moments and whether the candidate engages in ways that feel consistent with your department’s values.

Emotionally intelligent hiring also requires self-regulation—the discipline to slow down, hold back from snap judgments and lean into questions rather than assumptions. It thrives on relational transparency, where committee members can share subtle impressions without fear of being dismissed as merely “subjective.” And it rests on ethical discernment: the ability to examine whether those impressions are connected to job-relevant behaviors, not unconscious biases.

Testing What We Feel

Intuition shouldn’t be used to override policy or protocol. It should be used to sharpen it. When something feels off, ask yourself,
- Am I noticing a misalignment between the candidate’s stated values and their interpersonal behavior?
- Have others noted something similar?
- Is there a way to probe deeper in follow-up interviews?
- Can references offer insight into what I’m sensing?
- Is what I’m noticing connected to the job’s required competencies, or is it something unrelated?
If the answer to that last question is unclear, slow down. Revisit the evaluation criteria. Look for patterns. Talk with colleagues. Our job isn’t to be mind readers—it’s to be community stewards.

When Intuition Becomes Wisdom

We often think of emotional intelligence as something soft and interpersonal. But it’s also rigorous. It requires noticing your own biases, resisting overconfidence and attending to the full emotional ecology of a hiring process.

The truth is, faculty hires change departments. They shape culture, morale, collaboration and stability. We owe it to our institutions and ourselves to trust what we notice and to reflect on it with care.

Sometimes the most important insights don’t shout—they whisper. When we honor our instincts enough to examine them, and then ground them in facts, we hire with both head and gut. That practice doesn’t just avoid heartbreaks, mismatches and regrets—it builds stronger hires and healthier departments.

When we talk openly about what we sense—not just what we score—we build departments rooted in both discernment and trust.

Treavor Bogard is a department chair and associate professor of teacher education at the University of Dayton. He writes about emotionally intelligent leadership in higher education and is the author of The Emotionally Intelligent Chair, a Substack newsletter exploring the inner work of leading academic departments with purpose, reflection and care.
Source link
July 10, 2025
They Will Not Stop With UVA (opinion)

Each summer I make a point of stopping by a first-year orientation session at the University of Virginia, where I have been a professor in the music department for 18 years. The sessions take place in the historic concert hall on the floor below my office. On June 30, members of the Class of 2029 danced their arrival wearing the university’s colors of blue and orange.

Usually, the raw enthusiasm and promise of the students reminds me why, on many days, I love my job. It didn’t work this time. I just couldn’t resolve the dissonance between the fantasy and the reality. The fantasy was of a college education these young people worked so hard to land. In real life, the Department of Justice had just pressured our president, Jim Ryan, into quitting, demanding his resignation to supposedly resolve an investigation into the university’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

This is almost old news by now. But it shouldn’t be. There is a direct line between the Jan. 6 insurrection and the 2017 Unite the Right march, when, just days before first-year students started school, a few hundred white nationalists emboldened by the first Trump presidency marched across campus with their torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us.” The legal historian Farah Peterson, who used to teach here, writes that “an embrace of violence to assert constitutional claims” is baked into our history and that the founders understood violence as a way of making legal arguments.

The charge against UVA by the Department of Justice is being led by two UVA alums. One of them, Harmeet Dhillon, an assistant attorney general who overlapped with Jim Ryan at UVA law school, served as co-chair in 2020 of Lawyers for Trump, which challenged the presidential election results, and represented Trump in a defamation suit involving Stormy Daniels.

The ousting of Jim Ryan was not a surprise. But even after the Trump administration’s relentless siege on universities, it was a gut punch. Those of us who teach here have predicted for months that the Board of Visitors would try to fire Ryan this July, when all of its appointed members would be Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s appointees. We’ve been through that before. In 2012, when the Board of Visitors fired then-president Teresa Sullivan, faculty, students and alumni stood up to resist corporate America infringing on the educational mission of the university, and the board reinstated her.

Youngkin’s newest appointees to UVA’s board include the controversial Ken Cuccinelli, who, when he was the state attorney general, led an assault on academic freedom in the form of a civil investigation targeting five grants held by climate scientist Michael Mann. Youngkin, for his part, has long intended to purge the state’s education system of “divisive concepts”—things like acknowledging the fact that the buildings of Jefferson’s “Academical Village” were built by the enslaved. When the Board of Visitors banned DEI in March of this year, Youngkin gleefully stated, “DEI is done at the University of Virginia. We stand for the universal truth that everyone is created equal, and opportunity is at the heart of Virginians’ and Americans’ future.”

I think we know whom he means by “everyone.”

Beloved by many here, including me, Ryan is perhaps a once-in-a-generation leader. Still, he is so very far from “woke.” As the student satire magazine put it, “Fly high Jim, we’ll never forget the early mornings, late nights, and also the several hundred state troopers you sent to attack students for peacefully protesting.” In May 2024, Ryan did not hesitate to crack down on a very small pro-Palestine encampment. No one at the university cracked down on those tiki torch–bearing white nationalists.

Here is what we are guilty of: believing that our professional duty requires us to openly reflect on our individual and collective responsibilities in a democracy. We do think it’s our job to give our students tools to respond to the world they will inherit. If we were guilty of or capable of “left-wing indoctrination,” I suspect we would have a different governor and maybe different other things, too. Almost 70 percent of our students are from Virginia.

Because we are guilty of believing that history matters, we can’t ignore the wicked irony of a federal and state government killing diversity-related programs and forcing out a president in part by leveraging the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in1868. This amendment, which mandated equal protection for all humans, is now weaponized to protect only white people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, sex or national origin. It has been similarly weaponized.

Meanwhile, our history also includes these facts: The UVA biology department taught eugenics until 1953. Not only was the institution built by enslaved laborers, but by 1829 it had its very own slave patrol. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson wanted to establish a University of Virginia in part because too many young men went north and learned the evils of abolition. Such thinking amounted to a canker “eating on the vitals of our existence, and if not arrested at once will be beyond remedy.” More recently, the Office for Civil Rights did not approve the commonwealth of Virginia’s plan for desegregating higher education until 1982.

My current and former students have been texting from all over the world since Ryan’s June 27 resignation announcement. Mostly they want to know: Why UVA? Virginia is arguably ground zero for reckoning with the chattel slave system and its intertwining with a flailing fantasy of democracy. “The 1619 Project” made front-page news of it. But you don’t have to go back that far.

Thanks to the summer of 2017, for many Charlottesville now conjures images of burning torches and Nazi slogans. Over the weekend of Aug. 11 and 12, 2017, the sleeping dogs of America’s nasty history rose up from the evidently not dead. Richard Spencer (UVA, Class of 2001) helped orchestrate a torchlit nighttime march across our campus, the marchers barking, “Blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” The university let this happen. In her book about the weekend of Unite the Right and the ideology that inspired it, Deborah Baker writes, “The nature of this awakening appeared to go to the core of who we are and the myths and folklore that have sustained us as a nation.”

Also that weekend of Unite the Right, a young woman was murdered and dozens were injured when a neo-Nazi drove a car into a group of counterprotesters. While the city was still reeling, Trump went on television and claimed there had been “very fine people on both sides.” There was an uproar and a backlash then. And in September 2017, the president had no choice but to sign a congressional joint resolution condemning the violence and domestic terrorist attack in Charlottesville. It is clear that no such condemnation would be forthcoming today.

This administration will not stop with Jim Ryan, and they will not stop with UVA. The miraculous dean who got those first-year students to dance on a hot June day in 2025 will get them dancing at their graduation in May of 2029. But I am very afraid of what this university, and other institutions of higher learning across the country, will look and feel like by then.

Bonnie Gordon is a professor of music at the University of Virginia and vice president of the American Musicological Society.

Source link

July 10, 2025