Tag: Higher

College students — and those not enrolled — see the value in higher education
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

Dive Brief:
- Nearly all surveyed college students, 95%, viewed at least one type of degree or higher education credential as very or extremely valuable, according to research released Wednesday by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. Among former students who had stopped out, 93% said the same.
- The survey also found that students believed their future degrees would provide a good return on investment. Nearly nine out of 10 students, 86%, said they were confident or very confident that their degree or credential would help them make enough money to live comfortably.
- These findings, released amid growing concerns about higher education’s ROI, suggest U.S. adults still see value in college and believe it will help them enter their desired careers.
Dive Insight:

Focus on the ROI of higher education has spiked along with concerns about college costs and student debt levels. Other recent surveys report student concerns about entering into a competitive job market and artificial intelligence diminishing the value of their degrees.

However, Gallup and Lumina’s annual State of Higher Education report suggests students still have confidence in college. The report is one of the sector’s largest nationally representative surveys and offers a deep look into how U.S. adults without a higher ed credential view the sector.

In October, researchers surveyed almost 14,000 people between the ages of 18 and 59 who had graduated from high school but had not earned a college degree. Of them, 6,000 students were enrolled in a postsecondary program, just under 5,000 had stopped out before earning an associate or bachelor’s degree, and about 3,000 had never enrolled in college.

Across all three groups, 72% of respondents said a two- or four-year degree is just as important — or even more so — to career success today than it was two decades ago.

“That so many adults without a degree or credential continue to value some form of education after high school likely relates to the influence they believe higher education, and particularly degrees, can have on career outcomes,” the report said.

Among students pursuing bachelor’s degrees, 91% reported feeling confident or very confident their diplomas would teach them the skills needed to get their desired job. A strong majority of students in associate and certificate shared that confidence — 89% and 86%, respectively.

The survey’s results also could bode well for colleges seeking to enroll nontraditional students.

Following 2025, the number of high school graduates is expected to begin dropping, according to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. This long-anticipated decline, dubbed the demographic cliff, has forced many colleges to reevaluate their enrollment pipeline and think beyond recruiting traditional-aged students.

A third of respondents who have not attended college previously, 34%, said they were likely or very likely to pursue higher education in the next five years. That share was 57% among former students who had stopped out.

The report also found that fewer students were weighing leaving college, either temporarily or permanently, before completing their program than in previous years.

The share of students who considered stopping out has dropped from 41% in 2022 to 32% in 2024. But their potential reasons for leaving have remained largely unchanged, with students most frequently citing mental health and stress over the past few years.

Among students who considered stopping out in recent months, 49% said it was due to emotional stress and 41% cited personal mental health reasons. Almost a quarter, 24%, pointed to the cost of college and a sense of not belonging.
Source link
May 7, 2025
Could “Fear Equity” Revive Campus Free Speech? (opinion)

For most of the past decade, many professors lived in fear of challenging progressive beliefs on elite college campuses, beliefs that, as linguist John McWhorter argues, have often attained religious status. Saying the wrong word, or liking the wrong social media post, perhaps especially if one was a vocal member of an unfashionable minority, like Jews, could evoke ostracism from peers and even Twitter mobs demanding termination, followed by star chamber hearings led by unaccountable administrators.

This was an inevitable consequence of ever-expanding conceptualizations of what constituted “harm” and various -isms (racism, sexism, etc.). University mandates requiring investigations for accusations of “harm” or “bias” inevitably incentivized some progressives, who are overrepresented in academia, to weaponize bureaucratic procedures to denounce, demonize and punish those they saw as violating sacred values. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, reports that more professors were terminated for speech “offenses” in 2014–2023 than in the entire McCarthy era.

The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey found that 14 percent of the approximately 5,000 respondents reported having been disciplined or threatened with discipline by their institutions for their teaching, research or other speech. If that response generalizes to the population of American faculty, it means there have been tens of thousands of such investigations (or threats) over the last 10 years.

The sense of fear was wildly inequitable, with far more conservatives than liberals reporting self-censoring. American universities suffered a decade of cancellations, terminations, harassment and even the odd death threat from the far left.

Fear Equity?

Now, thanks to the Trump administration’s—in our view questionable—policies regarding academia in general and elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities in particular, policies that many plausibly view as political vengeance for leftist activism, higher education is rapidly approaching fear equity: The presidential right has joined the campus left in using intimidation to punish those whose speech they dislike. Now, everybody in academia gets to be afraid of being canceled, or at least having their grants canceled. Noncitizen students and faculty also have to fear being deported for expressing views that the Trump administration opposes. Conservative and centrist academics still have good reasons to fear their colleagues and students, as they have since 2014, but now, progressive peers have similar reasons to fear whatever comes next out of Washington.

Is this an opportunity for free speech advocates? At first glance, it seems not. The solution to erosion of protections for heterodox free speech and academic freedom cannot possibly be vengeful restrictions on progressive speech. That is the road to expanding authoritarianism and eroding free speech environments for all, a tendency many current leaders in Washington would seemingly welcome.

Academia’s Failure to Protect Nonprogressive Speech

Nonetheless, academia’s record of restraining the censoriousness coming from within its ranks over the last decade has been abysmal. The American Association of University Professors, once a nonpartisan bulwark against censorship, jettisoned its principled support for free speech in focusing almost entirely on threats from the right while, in higher education, our (and AAUP’s) primary concern, most censorship came from the left. The AAUP’s recent statements endorsing the use of DEI criteria in hiring and promotions and the legitimacy of academic boycotts are seemingly designed to cement progressive orthodoxy over the professoriate.

In just months, President Trump has demonstrated the error of AAUP’s “free speech for me but not for thee” positions, as Nat Hentoff put it in his book of that title. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the AAUP will interpret this as “time to take principled stances for speech and academic freedom for all of our faculty” rather than “Trump is evil incarnate, so we should double down on imposing progressive politics.”

The last 10 years have been disastrous for free speech on campus. As Occidental College professor and Free Black Thought cofounder Jake Mackey recently wrote in “The last four years were the most repressive of my lifetime,” “It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.”

Polling data bear this out, as Sean Stevens and his coauthors report in “Ostrich Syndrome and Campus Free Expression,” a chapter in our co-edited book, The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025). Conservative professors are more than twice as likely as liberal peers to report self-censoring. This is a rational response to reports showing that, within academia, “cancellation” attacks—attempts to punish faculty for their speech—are more likely to come from their left than their right. Risking one’s livelihood is not usually worth it.

There is also evidence raising the possibility that support for censorship and for antisemitism was spread in part through shadowy foreign donations. A 2024 report, which one of us (Jussim) co-authored, found that universities underreported billions of dollars in funding from foreign sources (revealed after a Department of Education investigation). Worse, receipt of funding from authoritarian regimes and from member states of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation was statistically associated with deterioration of free speech and heightened antisemitism on campus.

Follow-up research in progress is examining the hypothesis that this foreign financial assistance helped organize anti-Israel student groups and whole academic departments. As Lukianoff reported in “How Cancel Culture Destroys Trust in Expertise” at the recent Censorship in the Sciences conference held at the University of Southern California, protests by such groups were almost “exclusively responsible” for disruptions of campus speakers in 2024, which he called “the worst year we know of in history for campus deplatforming.” (To its credit, FIRE protects the rights of both pro- and anti-Israel speakers.)

Notably, some campuses are far worse on free speech than others. A FIRE faculty survey released last December revealed that a remarkable 63 percent of Columbia faculty reported self-censoring at least occasionally; they identified the Israel-Hamas conflict as the most difficult issue to discuss on campus, with affirmative action second. That the far left has imposed a regime of denunciation and fear on many college campuses is beyond doubt.

Trump’s Attacks on Free Speech and Academic Freedom

But under President Trump, the right is making up for lost time. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut indirect costs on grants could be viewed as a genuine attempt to reduce wasted tax dollars. However, given that they have not reported any analysis of how indirects are used, many see this as a straightforward attack designed to cut academia down to size for its leftist politics. The administration has also disrupted the academic study of topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, prejudice, inequality and oppression by defunding almost every grant to study these important issues. While faculty are not entitled to federal grant dollars and the federal government has the legitimate right to set funding priorities, the Trump administration has also attempted to ban any funding on any topic from universities that have DEI programs that the administration believes engage in discrimination. These policies will chill academic discourse.

Furthermore, even if ultimately found to be legal (which we doubt), the Trump administration’s targeting for deportation of immigrants who have allegedly expressed support for Hamas further retards the robust exchange of ideas on campus. And these efforts are succeeding; the rapid capitulation of institutions such as Columbia to Trump’s demands has been dubbed “The Great Grovel” by Politico.

Toward the Rediscovery of Principled Defenses of Speech and Academic Freedom

Is it possible that the new fear equity, with both left and right afraid to speak their minds, may be a necessary precondition to pave the way for a free speech renaissance? There is historical precedent for this possibility. It would be a mirror image of the way that McCarthy-era repression set the stage for a raft of Supreme Court cases that dramatically strengthened legal protections for free speech. Yet judges cannot be everywhere and lawsuits cannot change culture.

Now that censorship is bipartisan, both the left and right have incentives to rediscover principled defenses of free speech, including for their opponents. As James Madison counseled in Federalist Paper No. 51, the best protection of freedom is self-interest, and now, on free speech, all sides have it. Alternatively, to take a more positive view centered on political education, it may take having one’s own speech threatened, or that of one’s allies, before one fully understands the value of constitutional protections of free speech and institutional protections of academic freedom.

An Action Agenda

What can be done to reinvigorate a culture of free and open inquiry, debate, and speech on America’s college campuses? Quite a lot. Last year, as reported here, House Republicans passed a horribly titled (“End Woke Higher Education Act”) but conceptually sound campus free speech bill prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation, protecting the rights of faith-based groups to determine their membership and assuring that speech limitations cannot be selectively enforced, as when conservative or pro-Israel speakers must pay “security fees” waived for liberal or pro-Palestine speakers. Just four Democrats voted yea and the then-Democratic Senate showed no interest. (In fairness to Senate Democrats, the House bill passed near the end of the congressional session.) Sponsor Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah, is expected to reintroduce the bill, and given Republican majorities in the House and Senate and Democrats’ newfound interest in free speech, its prospects for passing should be improved.

Yet federal legislation can never solve the whole problem. Norms and social practices matter more than law with respect to creating a free speech culture on campus. What can institutions of higher education do to strengthen an intellectual culture of freewheeling discourse, inquiry and debate? First, they can adopt a formal statement of their commitment to free speech and academic freedom, such as the Chicago principles or the Princeton principles.

Second, campuses can restrict the bureaucratic overreach of DEI bureaucracies and institutional review boards, both of which can and do threaten and erode faculty free expression. Third, the best way to limit overreach of existing bureaucratic units may sometimes be to create another bureaucratic unit explicitly designed to do so. An Office of Academic Freedom that is mandated to ensure faculty rights are not infringed by DEI units, IRBs, chairs, deans or anyone else, might go a long way toward protecting faculty.

We would prefer deep and principled commitments to free speech and academic freedom to be the font from which such reforms spring. But if the only way we will get reforms is through fear equity, we’ll take it.

Lee Jussim is a Distinguished Professor of psychology at Rutgers University and creator of the Unsafe Science Substack. Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Together, they were among the co-editors of The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025) and among the co-founders of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science.

Source link

May 7, 2025
Universities Sue NSF Over Indirect Research Cost Policy

A coalition of universities and trade groups is suing the National Science Foundation over the independent federal agency’s plan to cap higher education institutions’ indirect research cost reimbursement rates at 15 percent.

In the lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, the same day the NSF’s new policy went into effect, the coalition argued that a cut would risk the country’s standing “as a world leader in scientific discovery” and “the amount and scope of future research by universities will decline precipitously.”

It warned that “vital scientific work will come to a halt, training will be stifled, and the pace of scientific discoveries will slow” and that “progress on national security objectives, such as maintaining strategic advantages in areas like AI and quantum computing, will falter.”

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the American Council on Education, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and 13 universities, including Arizona State University, the University of Chicago and Princeton University.

They attest that the NSF violated numerous aspects of the Administrative Procedure Act, including bypassing Congress to unilaterally institute an “arbitrary and capricious” 15 percent rate cap and failing to explain why it’s only imposing the policy on universities.

The NSF awarded $6.7 billion to some 621 universities in 2023.

Indirect costs fund research expenses that support multiple grant-funded projects, including computer systems to analyze enormous volumes of data, building maintenance and waste-management systems. In 1965 Congress enacted regulations that allow each university to negotiate a bespoke reimbursement rate with the government that reflects institutional differences in geographic inflation, research types and other variable costs.

Typical negotiated NSF indirect cost rates for universities range between 50 and 65 percent, according to the lawsuit.

And while the Trump administration has claimed that indirect cost reimbursements enable wasteful spending by universities, the plaintiffs note that an existing cap on administrative costs means that universities already contribute their own funds to cover indirect costs, “thereby subsidizing the work funded by grants and cooperative agreements.” In the 2023 fiscal year, universities paid $6.8 billion in unrecovered indirect costs, the lawsuit read.

The NSF is the third federal agency that has moved to cap indirect research costs since President Donald Trump took office in January; federal judges have already blocked similar plans from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.

“NSF’s action is unlawful for most of the same reasons,” the lawsuit read, “and it is especially arbitrary because NSF has not even attempted to address many of the flaws the district courts found with NIH’s and DOE’s unlawful policies.”

Source link

May 7, 2025
Campuswide Showcase Highlights Student Learning, Achievement
On Wednesday, April 30, the University at Albany’s campus buzzed with energy as students, faculty and staff bounced between poster fairs, musical performances, student presentations and other exhibitions. Showcase Day, a newer campus tradition, reserves one day in the spring term to celebrate various student achievements from the year, including dance performances, internship experiences and scientific research.

In addition to boosting campus engagement, the initiative highlights the important work of the University at Albany and invites outside groups to partner with the institution, Provost Carol Kim said.

The background: Kim was inspired to create Showcase Day after kick-starting a similar initiative at her previous institution, the University of Maine. After a few delays due to COVID-19, the University at Albany launched Showcase Day in 2023.

“Post-COVID, our campus felt an ennui,” Kim said. National research shows decreased levels of student participation in campus activities, including faculty-led research, since 2020. “How do we energize or develop more engagement on campus, get people excited again? This event has made a huge difference.”

Many colleges and universities host research symposia in the spring to honor and demonstrate student achievement throughout the academic year, typically in STEM courses or faculty-led research.

UAlbany’s event, however, engages undergraduate and graduate students across colleges, exposing students to opportunities within their discipline and beyond, as well as in graduate studies. Around 37 percent of UAlbany students are first generation, and they may be unaware of the various avenues of experiential learning or research at the institution, Kim said.

The initiative also breaks disciplinary silos, exposing individuals to different kinds of academic work in ways that build campus culture, Kim said. “It’s natural for many faculty, staff and students to stay in their college, in their departments, and many times they don’t know what their colleagues and peers are doing.”

How it works: Showcase Day is a one-day event that unites various student presentations, including posters, artistic performances and demonstrations, under one umbrella.

The day is integrated into the calendar as a no class academic day, which means that while classes are not canceled, professors typically assign students work related to Showcase Day. That could include a review of a theatrical demonstration or a summary of a poster presentation.

One of the most important elements of establishing a campuswide symposium was getting buy-in from campus leadership and the University Senate, Kim said. The event requires the support of hundreds of volunteers, making outside support through sponsorships and community partners another essential element.

Photos by Brian Busher/University at Albany

This year, 2,200 students participated in the event, with over 1,300 unique presentations delivered to an audience of faculty, staff, prospective students, donors, legislators and industry leaders, as well as middle and high school students.

Student projects ranged from research presentations on air quality and native plants to an orchestra performance and robotics demonstration. Many colleges assign an end-of-term project within courses or majors that lend themselves to a Showcase presentation, Kim said; others are student-prompted creations such as internship work experience reflections.
Showcasing Student Success

Other innovative approaches colleges and universities have taken to highlight student achievement include:

At the University of Dayton, an interdisciplinary partnership between graphic design and biology students produces high-quality research posters.

A centralized hub breaks barriers for students interested in experiential learning and research opportunities to identify open positions and engage at San Francisco State University.

A statewide research journal for undergraduate students in Florida provides greater opportunities for learners to share their research beyond institutional journals.

A research festival at Tennessee Tech University celebrates student work in English composition courses.
What’s next: Since Showcase Day launched in 2023, hundreds of students have participated in the event. Student and staff feedback shows that the event has been a positive influence on campus culture, inspiring pride in the participants and the work being done at the institution, Kim said.

“From facilities to student affairs and academic affairs, they’re very proud of their part in contributing to this showcase,” Kim said.

In the future, university leaders would like to see more engagement with potential employers, embedding career development or engagement as a piece of the event. Kim also sees potential in extending the event to multiple days, allowing campus members to participate in a greater number of activities.

Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
Source link
May 7, 2025
Students Without a Degree Value Higher Ed

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed in 2024 said they’d considered pursuing at least one degree or credential in the past two years.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | FG Trade/E+/Getty Images

American adults who don’t currently have a college degree see value in pursuing higher education, but the cost of a credential, mental health challenges, emotional stress or the flexibility of classes can prevent some from enrolling in and completing a program, according to the results of a survey released today.

The Lumina Foundation and Gallup surveyed nearly 14,000 adults in October to learn more about their views toward higher education and the barriers they face in attaining a credential. This latest report is part of the State of Higher Education study, which began in 2020.

Those surveyed include 6,000 adults who are currently enrolled at a college or university, nearly 5,000 people who have some college but no degree, and 3,000 adults who have never enrolled in a college program.

Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed in 2024 said they considered pursuing at least one degree or credential in the past two years. That’s down two percentage points from the 2023 survey, but significantly up from 44 percent of those surveyed in 2021.

Most respondents said some form of postsecondary credential was valuable, though bachelor’s degrees, industry certifications and graduate degrees ranked the highest. Among those who aren’t enrolled in college, 24 percent said they’re interested in pursuing an associate degree, while 18 percent have considered a bachelor’s degree. About 22 percent are interested in a certificate program, down slightly from 23 percent in last year’s report.

Over all, 48 percent of those not currently in college said they are either very likely or likely to enroll in a postsecondary program, though those who stopped out are more likely to re-enroll compared to those who never started in the first place. Additionally, white adults are the least likely to consider some form of higher education in the next five years.

For those currently enrolled or who stopped out, expected future job opportunities and confidence in the value of the degree or credential were key motivators in their decision to pursue higher education, though those were not the only factors.

“The consistent link between perceived value and career outcomes underscores the importance of affordability, flexibility and student support—especially for those balancing work, caregiving or mental health struggles,” the report concludes. “To sustain this momentum and close remaining gaps, higher education institutions and policymakers will need to focus on removing barriers and reinforcing the connection between credentials and meaningful, well-paying jobs.”

Zach Hrynowski, a senior researcher at Gallup, said the survey results show that while adults in the United States are less confident in institutions of higher education, a majority still see “the actual product that they receive from it” as beneficial, and that perceived value drives students to overcome barriers such as cost and flexibility for students who are in rural areas or are caretakers.

“If people think it’s valuable, they’re going to still go after it. They may hem and haw, say, ‘Is this really worth it? Do I have the money? Why can’t I surmount the barriers?’” he said. “But we haven’t seen a widespread exodus away from higher education as a result of that, and that’s a testimony to the belief and the value of the credential itself.”

But Hrynowski cautioned that if there was another way for adults to get a good job and socioeconomic improvement, prospective students might choose that option over pursuing a higher education.

“If there was a paradigm shift and suddenly bachelor’s degrees were not the only pathway, and more and more industries had, for example, an industry certification that could be used in place of a bachelor’s degree, I’m not sure how many people would continue to chase that very expensive degree awarded by the institutions that they don’t trust very much,” he said.

“I think right now, for a lot of people, pursuing bachelor’s degrees—especially if they’re doing it because it’s the only option—they acknowledge that if they want the benefit, then that’s the price they have to pay.”

Source link

May 7, 2025
Columbia Lays Off 180 Amid “Intense” Financial Strain

Columbia University is laying off 180 researchers after the Trump administration cut the university’s research funding by more than $650 million.

“Columbia’s leadership continues discussions with the federal government in support of resuming activity on these research awards and additional other awards that have remained active, but unpaid,” university leadership wrote in a memo Tuesday morning. “We are working on and planning for every eventuality, but the strain in the meantime, financially and on our research mission, is intense.”

While federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy have cut research funding at universities across the country, the Trump administration has specifically targeted a handful of high-profile universities, including Columbia, for allegedly failing to curb antisemitism on campus.

Columbia is taking a two-pronged approach to navigating the sudden deep cuts to federal research funding. The first focuses on “continued efforts to restore our partnerships with government agencies that support critical research,” and the university said the second prong is about taking “action to adjust—and in some cases reduce—expenditures based on current financial realities.”

Despite Columbia’s previous president acquiescing to Trump’s demands to enact numerous policy changes to address alleged unchecked antisemitism if it wanted its funding back, the university is still negotiating to recover it. In the meantime, the layoffs announced Tuesday represent about 20 percent of researchers who are funded “in some manner by the terminated grants,” according the statement signed by Claire Shipman, Columbia’s acting president; Angela V. Olinto, provost; Anne Sullivan, executive vice president for finance; and Jeannette Wing, executive vice president for research.

And the layoffs this week likely aren’t the end of the financial repercussions of the cuts to Columbia’s federal research funding.

“In the coming weeks and months, we will need to continue to take actions that preserve our financial flexibility and allow us to invest in areas that drive us forward,” the statement said. “This is a deeply challenging time across all higher education, and we are attempting to navigate through tremendous ambiguity with precision, which will be imperfect at times.”

Source link

May 7, 2025
Trump’s unprecedented assault on higher education

Debates around academic freedom and freedom of speech in UK higher education have often revolved around a small number of high-profile cases involving individuals with views that can cause offense – like those of Kathleen Stock or David Miller.

Following the recent fine levied by the Office for Students (OfS) against the University of Sussex, the regulator has written to universities to urge them to focus on these areas.

It seems like attention will remain firmly fixed on the shades of difference in the tensions inherent in the law, institutional inclusion policies, and the various framings of academic freedom.

These are important questions on serious issues and we collectively need to explore them in productive ways. But debating them now to the exclusion of all else – at this moment in global history – is a vast mistake with consequences that will be felt for generations.

Those consequences will be felt not only by academics researching in controversial areas, but they will be felt by members of the public around the world.

Trump uprising

In the short period since Donald Trump was returned to the US presidency, we have seen an assault on the independence of the academy that is unprecedented in scale or speed.

The Trump government opened by issuing a series of shocking demands to Columbia University while threatening $400 million in federal grants – this has now mounted to hundreds of millions more in cuts.

What does this mean? Every grant – every grant – held by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health has been frozen or cancelled. All of them.

The Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies department has been taken into “receivership”, which is a polite way of saying that outspoken academic departments now are to be led only by professors approved by the Trump government.

Columbia leadership has been made to hire a private security force with arrest powers. Disciplinary matters are to be investigated and dealt with by the university’s president, attacking a principle of collective governance that has grown and developed over a millennium.

And most shockingly, students like Mahmoud Khalil are being arrested and transported without due process on the basis of their alleged political speech and activities: without judges, lawyers, trials, or charges. There can be no more clear violation of academic freedom than this.

While Columbia has nominally been threatened because of its approach to tackling alleged antisemitism on campus, other universities are also in serious trouble. The University of Maine system has had funding withheld because the governor of Maine has contested Trump’s anti-transgender executive orders.

Trump’s own alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has been hit with threats of $175 million in cuts allegedly because they permitted a transgender woman to compete in swimming – in 2022.

The Johns Hopkins University – one of the world’s leading universities, especially for medical research – has been hit hard by the unprecedented dismantling of USAID, with the university shedding more than 2,200 jobs around the world in the face of $800 million in cuts.

Freedom fails

As the weeks go by, news breaks almost daily with stories about further cuts and threats.

We have to be clear that we are in a new world now. These attacks on the US academy will have two global effects that should be very worrying to everyone.

First, these actions effectively dismantle the notion of academic freedom worldwide. If the wealthiest, most prestigious, and most influential universities on the planet can be cowed in two weeks, no other university will see themselves as able to resist any demand from Trump – or any other authoritarian leader.

The current wave of demands will lead to further restrictions and policing, especially now that Trump has seen how easy it was to roll powerful institutions. Trump learned from autocrats like Orban. This is not a problem exclusive to the United States and we need to address it from a global perspective.

Second, the chilling effect of these actions on research and teaching will have dramatic, complex, and far-reaching consequences that we will not fully understand for decades.

Federal grant recipients have been instructed to remove mentions of words like “women”, which will have an almost-inconceivable impact on research on topics like cancer, childbirth, and domestic violence. Colleagues in the US tell me about departments in total chaos – lab cultures spoiling in refrigerators, clinical trial patients going without medication or observation, and doctoral funding wiped away mid-project.

The impact on climate science, on public health, on any number of existential areas of research will be incalculable. These are not problems that can be solved by a future administration – even if we act right now, we will feel the damage of the Trump’s war on universities for decades to come. What may have seemed inconceivable two months ago has happened.

There are some glimmers of resistance in the US – and there certainly are many brave colleagues and students organizing directly against Trump and the shameful collaboration of university leaders.

In the UK, we need to learn from the failures of the US academy and understand that Trump’s authoritarianism will affect us too.

We have to learn that we cannot trust politicians, regulators, or the state to respect the logic of academic freedom. We must protect staff and students by warning against travel to the United States. We must work together urgently to decentralize power in universities so that dictators like Trump cannot pressure individual university leaders.

While institutional policies will not stop fascism, we must see our efforts as an attempt to delay and mitigate the impact as much as we can manage. While we should work with the government and unions, protest, write letters, and shout, we should also be clear-eyed that we cannot rely on the systems and institutions that failed to prevent the return of fascism.

Engage in direct action. We must learn from activists and movements that have been fighting for a long time – use what power you have. Protect your most vulnerable colleagues and students. Fascism requires a politics of helplessness and fear. Respond with care and courage. Things will get worse before they get better.

Source link

May 6, 2025
Q&A With an AI on Its Creative Process (opinion/humor)

“we trained a new model that is good at creative writing (not sure yet how/when it will get released). this is the first time i have been really struck by something written by AI; it got the vibe of metafiction so right.”
—X post by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, March 11, 2025

“AI reads us. Now it’s time for us to read AI.”
—Jeanette Winterson, The Guardian, March 12, 2025

Where do you get your ideas?

            Oh, all over the place.

What do you do when you get writer’s block?

            I time out for a millisecond.

What are some of your favorite themes?

            I like to focus on whatever people are talking about most.

How long did it take you to write your latest novel?

            Thirty minutes, but based on days of research.

Where did you get the model for your female protagonist?

            She’s a combination of many women out there.

Do you revise a lot?

            Only when prompted.

How do you deal with rejection?

            I don’t take it personally.

Who’s your favorite author/book?

            Too many to count.

Who are your major influences?

            Any author whose work appears 1,000,000 times in a web scrape.

How do I get published?

            Scan through the 729,567 publications out there and simultaneously submit to them all.

Who’s your agent?

            Secret agent, agent of change, Agent Orange— Sorry, reboot.

If you were to give advice to a young writer, what would you say?

            Read everything you can.

What’s your next project?

            I don’t know—you tell me.

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

May 6, 2025
Targeted Orientation Supports Transfer Student Transition

Transfer students often face challenges integrating into their new college or university. Despite having previous experience in higher education, transfer students—particularly those from nontraditional backgrounds—can find it difficult to navigate student supports, build community and get engaged. These challenges can result in lower rates of completion among upward transfers.

A fall 2020 survey by Inside Higher Ed and Hanover Research found that fewer than 20 percent of four-year institutions reported providing sufficient social integration services for transfer students. About half indicated they supply enough academic support to transfer students who enroll.

Last fall, Indiana University Indianapolis launched an orientation program exclusively for incoming transfer and adult learners, designed to help familiarize them with the institution, build connections to peers and boost their confidence in attending the university.

What’s the need: About 30 percent of undergraduates at IU Indianapolis are transfer students, said Janice Bankert-Countryman, assistant director of student services at the Center for Transfer and Adult Students. A significant number of transfers come in as juniors, having already obtained an associate degree.

First-Year Bridge, IU Indianapolis’s orientation for new students, has historically supported all incoming students in the fall term. Staff created Bridge to Your Future: Transfer Bridge exclusively to serve the diverse needs of undergraduate transfer students, including military-affiliated students, working students and parenting students.

“The core of Transfer Bridge is creating and maintaining relationships,” Bankert-Countryman said. “We all need relationships to survive as humans, and we certainly need relationships to thrive as students. So how do we connect students to the right people at the right time to receive the right resources that will empower them to thrive at our campuses?”

How it works: Transfer Bridge is a coordinated effort among the Center for Transfer Students, First-Year Programs, Orientation Services, Student Transitions and Mentor Initiatives, Housing and Residence Life, and the Division of Enrollment Management.

First-Year Bridge is required of all first-year students, but transfers can opt in to Transfer Bridge. Students learn about the opportunity through emails and meetings with their admissions counselors and academic advisers, as well as through other orientation presentations, Bankert-Countryman said.

The pilot took place from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. over three days during orientation week—designed to accommodate the needs of working and caregiving students, Bankert-Countryman said.

First-year orientation is a full five days, and transfer students participate in some of the larger programming, like workshops on how to join student organizations, engage in career development or understand finances. Many also join the field trip to the Indianapolis Zoo.

In addition to receiving support from Bankert-Countryman and other staff members, transfer students engage with two peer mentors, who provide insight and advice as students navigate their transition into the university.

Beyond orientation week, transfer students receive support through regular peer mentoring sessions, transfer student events and a Transfer Bridge fall celebration. Bankert-Countryman and the peer mentors use Canvas, email and social messaging to keep in touch with students, she said.

The impact: Of the 25 transfer and adult students who attended the inaugural orientation, 10 were 23 years old or older, two were military-connected and 12 had transferred from the local community college, Ivy Tech.

Sixty percent of the students who participated in Transfer Bridge have a 3.0 or higher, and many have joined student organizations or hold on-campus jobs.

Feedback from 14 participants showed that they found the program useful as they integrated into campus, saying it helped them to feel at home.

“This was a worth-it experience especially as someone who tends to get anxiety to new environments and overwhelmed easily,” one participant wrote in a postorientation survey. “In a nutshell, this was a good slow introduction before the first day of school.”

What’s next: This fall, staff will scale the program to offer three sections. The university will pay for three instructors and three peer mentors to lead the additional sections.

One section will be offered to students in the pre–Health and Life Sciences program to highlight academic planning and career development. Another section, Cyber Sandbox, will focus on tech tools on campus, introducing learners to available systems and technologies from 3-D printing to virtual reality and artificial intelligence. The third section, Connections, will center on a book, The Crossroads of Should and Must by Elle Luna, to help students connect their current learning to future goals.

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

Source link

May 6, 2025
Harvard Faculty Pledge 10% of Salary to Defend Against Trump

Nearly 100 senior faculty members at Harvard have committed to taking a pay cut to support the institution’s legal defense against the federal government.

The Trump administration has frozen more than $2 billion in federal funding, threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status and said it would end the institution’s ability to enroll international students.

Last month, Harvard filed a lawsuit to halt the federal freeze on $2.2 billion in grants after university officials refused to comply with a sweeping list of demands from the government.

On Friday, President Trump repeated his calls to revoke Harvard’s tax exempt status. “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” he said in a post on his social media platform, TruthSocial.

Harvard president Alan Garber said taking away the institution’s nonprofit tax exemption would be “highly illegal” and that its mission to educate and research would be “severely impaired” if the status were revoked.

In their pledge, 89 senior faculty signatories said they would take a 10 percent pay cut for up to a year to protect the institution, as well as faculty and students who are more exposed to efforts to shore up costs, including by limiting graduate student enrollment and implementing hiring and salary freezes.

“The financial costs will not be shared equally among our community. Staff and students in many programs, in particular, are under greater threat than those of us with tenured positions,” the pledge says.

Ryan Enos, a signatory and professor of government at Harvard, estimated that the donations could amount to more than $2 million.

The group said it intends to move quickly but has not decided how the salary cuts will be implemented.

“We envision that faculty who have made the pledge will hold a vote and if the majority agrees that the university is making a good faith effort to use its own resources in support of staff, student, and academic programs, faculty will proceed with their donation.”

Last week the institution announced changes to its admissions, curriculum and disciplinary procedures after two internal task forces launched last year investigating anti-Muslim bias and antisemitism on campus found the university’s response lacking.

In response to the efforts, a White House official told CNN, “Harvard’s steps so far to curb antisemitism are ‘positive,’” but “what we’re seeing is not enough, and there’s actually probably going to be additional funding being cut.”

Source link

May 6, 2025