The Trump administration wants colleges to make a number of changes to their policies in order to get an edge in grant funding.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images
After four universities rejected the Trump administration’s compact for higher education, the White House is planning to meet Friday afternoon with the remaining five that have yet to respond.
A White House official confirmed plans of the meeting to Inside Higher Ed but didn’t say what the purpose of the gathering was or which universities would attend. Nine universities were asked to give feedback on the wide-ranging proposal by Oct. 20.
The virtual meeting will likely include May Mailman, a White House adviser, and Vincent Haley, director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, according to a source with knowledge of the White House’s plans. Mailman, Haley and Education Secretary Linda McMahon signed the letter sent to the initial nine about the compact.
So far, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California have publicly rejected the deal. Dartmouth College, the University of Arizona, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University haven’t said whether they’ll agree to the compact. Trump officials have said that the signatories could get access to more grant funding and threatened the funding of those that don’t agree.
After USC released its letter rejecting the proposal, Liz Huston, a White House spokesperson, told the Los Angeles Times that “as long as they are not begging for federal funding, universities are free to implement any lawful policies they would like.”
Following the first rejection from MIT last Friday, President Trump posted on Truth Social that all colleges could now sign on. The White House has said that some institutions have already reached out to do so.
The source with knowledge of the White House’s plans said that the meeting “appears to be an effort to regain momentum by threatening institutions to sign even though it’s obviously not in the schools’ interest to do so.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that Arizona State University, the University of Kansas and Washington University in St. Louis were also invited. According to the Journal, the goal of the meeting was to answer questions about the proposal and to find common ground with the institutions.
Former senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican and trustee at Vanderbilt, wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the compact was an example of federal overreach akin to previous efforts to impose uniform national standards on K–12 schools.
“Mr. Trump’s proposed higher education compact may provoke some useful dialogue around reform,” he wrote. “But the federal government shouldn’t try to manage the nation’s 6,000 colleges and universities.”
Inside Higher Ed reached out to the remaining five institutions as well as the new invitees, but they haven’t responded to a request for comment or to confirm whether they’ll attend the meeting.
by Mehreen Ashraf, Eimear Nolan, Manual F Ramirez, Gazi Islam and Dirk Lindebaum
Walk into almost any university today, and you can be sure to encounter the topic of AI and how it affects higher education (HE). AI applications, especially large language models (LLM), have become part of everyday academic life, being used for drafting outlines, summarising readings, and even helping students to ‘think’. For some, the emergence of LLMs is a revolution that makes learning more efficient and accessible. For others, it signals something far more unsettling: a shift in how and by whom knowledge is controlled. This latter point is the focus of our new article published in Organization Studies.
At the heart of our article is a shift in what is referred to epistemic (or knowledge) governance: the way in which knowledge is created, organised, and legitimised in HE. In plain terms, epistemic governance is about who gets to decide what counts as credible, whose voices are heard, and how the rules of knowing are set. Universities have historically been central to epistemic governance through peer review, academic freedom, teaching, and the public mission of scholarship. But as AI tools become deeply embedded in teaching and research, those rules are being rewritten not by educators or policymakers, but by the companies that own the technology.
From epistemic agents to epistemic consumers
Universities, academics, and students have traditionally been epistemic agents: active producers and interpreters of knowledge. They ask questions, test ideas, and challenge assumptions. But when we rely on AI systems to generate or validate content, we risk shifting from being agents of knowledge to consumers of knowledge. Technology takes on the heavy cognitive work: it finds sources, summarises arguments, and even produces prose that sounds academic. However, this efficiency comes at the cost of profound changes in the nature of intellectual work.
Students who rely on AI to tidy up their essays, or generate references, will learn less about the process of critically evaluating sources, connecting ideas and constructing arguments, which are essential for reasoning through complex problems. Academics who let AI draft research sections, or feed decision letters and reviewer reports into AI with the request that AI produces a ‘revision strategy’, might save time but lose the slow, reflective process that leads to original thought, while undercutting their own agency in the process. And institutions that embed AI into learning systems hand part of their epistemic governance – their authority to define what knowledge is and how it is judged – to private corporations.
This is not about individual laziness; it is structural. As Shoshana Zuboff argued in The age of surveillance capitalism, digital infrastructures do not just collect information, they reorganise how we value and act upon it. When universities become dependent on tools owned by big tech, they enter an ecosystem where the incentives are commercial, not educational.
Big tech and the politics of knowing
The idea that universities might lose control of knowledge sounds abstract, but it is already visible. Jisc’s 2024 framework on AI in tertiary education warns that institutions must not ‘outsource their intellectual labour to unaccountable systems,’ yet that outsourcing is happening quietly. Many UK universities, including the University of Oxford, have signed up to corporate AI platforms to be used by staff and students alike. This, in turn, facilitates the collection of data on learning behaviours that can be fed back into proprietary models.
This data loop gives big tech enormous influence over what is known and how it is known. A company’s algorithm can shape how research is accessed, which papers surface first, or which ‘learning outcomes’ appear most efficient to achieve. That’s epistemic governance in action: the invisible scaffolding that structures knowledge behind the scenes. At the same time, it is easy to see why AI technologies appeal to universities under pressure. AI tools promise speed, standardisation, lower costs, and measurable performance, all seductive in a sector struggling with staff shortages and audit culture. But those same features risk hollowing out the human side of scholarship: interpretation, dissent, and moral reasoning. The risk is not that AI will replace academics but that it will change them, turning universities from communities of inquiry into systems of verification.
The Humboldtian ideal and why it is still relevant
The modern research university was shaped by the 19th-century thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt, who imagined higher education as a public good, a space where teaching and research were united in the pursuit of understanding. The goal was not efficiency: it was freedom. Freedom to think, to question, to fail, and to imagine differently.
That ideal has never been perfectly achieved, but it remains a vital counterweight to market-driven logics that render AI a natural way forward in HE. When HE serves as a place of critical inquiry, it nourishes democracy itself. When it becomes a service industry optimised by algorithms, it risks producing what Žižek once called ‘humans who talk like chatbots’: fluent, but shallow.
The drift toward organised immaturity
Scholars like Andreas Scherer and colleagues describe this shift as organised immaturity: a condition where sociotechnical systems prompt us to stop thinking for ourselves. While AI tools appear to liberate us from labour, what is happening is that they are actually narrowing the space for judgment and doubt.
In HE, that immaturity shows up when students skip the reading because ‘ChatGPT can summarise it’, or when lecturers rely on AI slides rather than designing lessons for their own cohort. Each act seems harmless; but collectively, they erode our epistemic agency. The more we delegate cognition to systems optimised for efficiency, the less we cultivate the messy, reflective habits that sustain democratic thinking. Immanuel Kant once defined immaturity as ‘the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another.’ In the age of AI, that ‘other’ may well be an algorithm trained on millions of data points, but answerable to no one.
Reclaiming epistemic agency
So how can higher education reclaim its epistemic agency? The answer lies not only in rejecting AI but also in rethinking our possible relationships with it. Universities need to treat generative tools as objects of inquiry, not an invisible infrastructure. That means embedding critical digital literacy across curricula: not simply training students to use AI responsibly, but teaching them to question how it works, whose knowledge it privileges, and whose it leaves out.
In classrooms, educators could experiment with comparative exercises: have students write an essay on their own, then analyse an AI version of the same task. What’s missing? What assumptions are built in? How were students changed when the AI wrote the essay for them and when they wrote them themselves? As the Russell Group’s 2024 AI principles note, ‘critical engagement must remain at the heart of learning.’
In research, academics too must realise that their unique perspectives, disciplinary judgement, and interpretive voices matter, perhaps now more than ever, in a system where AI’s homogenisation of knowledge looms. We need to understand that the more we subscribe to values of optimisation and efficiency as preferred ways of doing academic work, the more natural the penetration of AI into HE will unfold.
Institutionally, universities might consider building open, transparent AI systems through consortia, rather than depending entirely on proprietary tools. This isn’t just about ethics; it’s about governance and ensuring that epistemic authority remains a public, democratic responsibility.
Why this matters to you
Epistemic governance and epistemic agency may sound like abstract academic terms, but they refer to something fundamental: the ability of societies and citizens (not just ‘workers’) to think for themselves when/if universities lose control over how knowledge is created, validated and shared. When that happens, we risk not just changing education but weakening democracy. As journalist George Monbiot recently wrote, ‘you cannot speak truth to power if power controls your words.’ The same is true for HE. We cannot speak truth to power if power now writes our essays, marks our assignments, and curates our reading lists.
Mehreen Ashraf is an Assistant Professor at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, United Kingdom.
Eimear Nolan is an Associate Professor in International Business at Trinity Business School, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Manuel F Ramirez is Lecturer in Organisation Studies at the University of Liverpool Management School, UK.
Gazi Islam is Professor of People, Organizations and Society at Grenoble Ecole de Management, France.
Dirk Lindebaum is Professor of Management and Organisation at the School of Management, University of Bath.
Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott has gifted Morgan State University $63 million in unrestricted funds, the largest gift in the university’s history.
In 2020, Scott awarded the historically Black university in Baltimore $40 million, which went toward multiple research centers and endowed faculty positions, among other advancements.
Morgan State leaders announced that the new funding will help build the university’s endowment, expand student supports and advance its research.
David K. Wilson, president of Morgan State, called the gift “a resounding testament to the work we’ve done to drive transformation, not only within our campus but throughout the communities we serve.”
“To receive one historic gift from Ms. Scott was an incredible honor; to receive two speaks volumes about the confidence she and her team have in our institution’s stewardship, leadership, and trajectory,” Wilson said in the announcement. “This is more than philanthropy—it’s a partnership in progress.”
A recent report from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that high school students graduate college at higher rates and earn more after college if they’ve taken a combination of dual-enrollment and Advanced Placement courses.
The report, released Tuesday, drew on administrative data from Texas on students expected to graduate high school in 2015–16 and 2016–17, as well as some data from students expected to complete in 2019–20 and 2022–23. It explored how different kinds of accelerated coursework, and different combinations of such work, affected student outcomes.
Researchers found that students who combined Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses with dual-enrollment courses boasted higher completion rates and earnings than their peers. Of these students, 92 percent enrolled in or completed a credential a year after high school, and 71 percent earned a credential by year six.
These students also showed the strongest earnings outcomes in their early 20s. They earned $10,306 per quarter on average at age 24, compared to $9,746 per quarter among students who took only dual enrollment and $8,934 per quarter for students who took only AP/IB courses. However, students taking both dual-enrollment and AP/IB courses tended to be less racially and socioeconomically diverse than students taking AP/IB courses alone, the report found.
Students who combined dual enrollment with career and technical education—who made up just 5 percent of students in the study—also reaped positive outcomes later in life. These students earned $9,746 per quarter on average by age 24, compared to $8,097 per quarter on average for students with only a CTE focus.
“Most dual-enrollment students in Texas also take other accelerated courses, and those who do tend to have stronger college and earnings trajectories,” CCRC senior research associate Tatiana Velasco said in a press release. “It’s a pattern we hadn’t fully appreciated before, which offers clues for how to expand the benefits of dual enrollment to more students.”
The share of Americans who believe higher education has lost its way is on the rise, according to a new survey the Pew Research Center published Wednesday.
Of the 3,445 people who responded to the survey last month, 70 percent said higher education is generally “going in the wrong direction,” up from 56 percent in 2020. They cited high costs, poor preparation for the job market and lackluster development of students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
The survey results come amid turmoil for the higher education sector, which was already facing rising public skepticism about the value of a college degree before Donald Trump took office earlier this year. But over the past nine months, the Trump administration has terminated billions in federal research grants and withheld even more money from several selective institutions.
Another survey published this week found that most Americans oppose the government’s cuts to higher education.
Earlier this month, Trump asked universities to sign a compact that would give them preference in federal funding decisions if they agree to make sweeping operational changes, including suppressing criticism of conservative views on campus.
But the state of campus free speech is already one factor driving the public’s overall negative views about higher education, according to the survey.
Forty-five percent of respondents said colleges and universities are doing a fair or poor job of exposing students to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints; 46 percent said institutions are doing an inadequate job of providing students opportunities to express their own opinions and viewpoints.
Political leanings also influenced perceptions of higher education, though the gap between Republicans and Democrats has narrowed in recent years.
According to the survey, 77 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents said higher education is moving in the wrong direction, compared to 65 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning respondents.
Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say that universities are doing a poor or fair job of preparing students for well-paying jobs, developing students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills, exposing students to a wide range of opinions and viewpoints, and providing opportunities for students to express their own opinions and views.
A new report analyzes earnings for college graduates from different majors.
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Despite mounting public skepticism about the value of a college degree, the data is still clear: Over all, college graduates have much higher earning potential than their peers without a bachelor’s degree. But the limits of those boosted earnings are often decided by a student’s major.
American workers with a four-year degree ages 25 to 54 earn a median annual salary of $81,000—70 percent more than their peers with a high school diploma alone, according to a new report that Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce published Thursday. However, the salary range for workers with a bachelor’s degree can span anywhere from $45,000 a year for graduates of education and public service to $141,000 for STEM majors.
And even within those fields, salary levels have a big range. Humanities majors in the prime of their careers earn between $48,000 and $105,000 a year, with a median salary of $69,000. Meanwhile, business and communications majors earn between $58,000 and $129,000 a year, with a median salary of $86,000.
“Choosing a major has long been one of the most consequential decisions that college students make—and this is particularly true now, when recent college graduates are facing an unusually rocky labor market,” said Catherine Morris, senior editor and writer at CEW and lead author of the report, “The Major Payoff: Evaluating Earnings and Employment Outcomes Across Bachelor’s Degrees.”
“Students need to weigh their options carefully.”
The report, which analyzed earnings and unemployment data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey from 2009 to 2023, also documented rising unemployment for recent college graduates. In 2008, recent graduates had lower unemployment rates relative to all workers (6.8 percent versus 9.8 percent). But that gap has narrowed over the past 15 years; since 2022, recent college graduates have faced higher levels of unemployment relative to all workers.
Morris attributed rising unemployment for recent college graduates to a mix of factors, including increased layoffs in white-collar fields, the rise of artificial intelligence and general economic uncertainty. At the same time, climbing tuition prices and the student debt crisis have heightened consumer concern about a degree’s return on investment.
“Over the past 15 years, there’s been more and more of a shift toward students wanting to get degrees in majors that they perceive as lucrative or high-paying,” Morris, who noted that STEM degrees, especially computer science, have become increasingly popular. Meanwhile, the popularity of humanities degrees has declined.
But just because a degree has higher earning potential doesn’t mean it’s immune to job instability. In 2022, 6.8 percent of recent graduates with computer science degrees were unemployed, while just 2.2 percent of education majors—who typically earn some of the lowest salaries—were unemployed.
“The more specific the major, the more sensitive it is to sectoral shocks,” said Jeff Strohl, director of the center at Georgetown. “More general majors actually have a lot more flexibility in the labor market. I would expect to see some of the softer majors that start with higher unemployment than the STEM majors be a little more stable.”
And earning a graduate degree can also substantially boost earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree in a more general field, such as multidisciplinary studies, social sciences or education and public service. Meanwhile, the graduate earnings premium for more career-specific fields isn’t as high.
“About 25 percent of bachelor of arts majors don’t by themselves have a positive return on investment,” Strohl said. “But we need to look at the graduate earnings premium, because many B.A. majors don’t stand by themselves.”
Although salaries for college graduates are one metric that can help college students decide on a major, Morris said it shouldn’t be the only consideration.
“Don’t just chase the money,” she said. “The job market can be very unpredictable. Students need to be aware of their own intrinsic interests and find ways to differentiate themselves.”
The report, released Thursday, shows the majority of students see a positive return on investment within 10 years, but Strada says it isn’t enough.
Chaichan Pramjit/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Seventy percent of the country’s college graduates see their investment pay off within 10 years, but that outcome correlates strongly to the state where a student obtains their degree, according to the Strada Foundation’s latest State Opportunity Index.
The report, released Thursday, shows that states such as California and Delaware surpass the average at 76 percent and 75 percent, respectively, while North Dakota, for example, falls significantly short at 53 percent.
Across the board, the nation still has a ways to go before it can ensure all graduates see a positive return on investment, according to the report.
“Too many learners invest substantial time and money without achieving strong career and earnings outcomes,” it says. “Meanwhile, many employers struggle to find the skilled talent they need to fill high-wage jobs.”
Strada hopes that the index and the five categories it highlights—outcomes, coaching, affordability, work-based learning and employer alignment—will provide a framework for policymakers to “strengthen the link between education and opportunity.”
“The State Opportunity Index reinforces our belief at Strada Education Foundation that we as a nation can’t just focus on college access and completion and assume that a college degree will consistently deliver for all on the promise of postsecondary education as a pathway to opportunity,” Strada president Stephen Moret said in a news release. “We must look at success beyond completion, with a sharper focus on helping people land jobs that pay well and offer growth opportunities.”
Donald Trump’s defunding of scientific research and proposed new charges on migrant labor will not be enough to deter international academics from heading to America, given the country’s unparalleled willingness to reward academic talent, Radenka Maric has argued.
Since February 2022, Maric has served as president of the University of Connecticut, a six-campus public research university with a $3.6 billion annual operating budget.
The Bosnian-born engineer is arguably one of the world’s most well-traveled university leaders, having worked in seven countries in a 30-year career, including Japan (where she earned her Ph.D. at Kyoto University and worked at Toyota’s material science research division), Canada (where she led the Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation at the National Research Council Canada), and Italy (where she was a visiting professor at Polytechnic University of Milan on a Fulbright scholarship).
“As someone born in Bosnia without a U.S. college degree, I would never have been made a university president in Japan, Italy or even Canada,” argued Maric, who studied at Belgrade University in Serbia, where she later worked as a junior scientist.
“I don’t have that traditional academic pedigree required by some countries. I didn’t study at Harvard—I have a ‘Japanese Harvard’ Ph.D., but who really cares about my Japanese degree—nor have I been a provost or dean at a big U.S. university,” she continued.
“But American universities don’t care if you studied in Italy or Serbia—they are only focused on excellence in science and innovation, which means ‘what is your h-index?,’ ‘where have you published?’ and ‘how many people have you brought with you on your journey?’” Maric said.
Despite uncertainty over federal science funding—with several national agencies facing cuts of about 50 percent to their budgets next year—the academic meritocracy promised by U.S. universities will continue to appeal to international researchers, Maric believes.
“That is what is powerful about American academia. As long as the American dream is there—that people like me can make it on their own merits—then America will be a magnet for talent. Crises will come and go,” she said.
The current uncertainty over funding has undoubtedly caused problems, Maric explained, while there are growing concerns over plans to charge a $100,000 fee for H-1B skilled worker visas, up from $7,000—a move that would make it much more difficult for U.S. universities to employ foreign Ph.D. students or postdocs.
On the likely damage of Trump’s recent higher education policies, Maric said, “It depends how long this lasts, but America has a great capacity to resituate itself very quickly. If you compare how the U.S. pivoted after the 2008 financial crisis, it came back much quicker than any other nation.”
Despite her evident enthusiasm for her adopted homeland, Maric said she was also inspired by her time in Japan. “This was the 1990s and I was the only woman doing a Ph.D. at Kyoto’s engineering school. I stayed for 12 years there, so it wasn’t just the language that I learned but the culture. There is an immense amount of care in how everything is done, so I applied this to my career by thinking, ‘how can I improve my skills?’ or ‘how can my research get better?’
“When I was in Japan, it was constantly stressed that there was no great science if it didn’t lead to great technology. And there is no great technology without a product, and there is no product without a market,” Maric explained of her approach to applied science—she worked in the field of battery technology for Toyota and later Panasonic before leaving to join a start-up in Atlanta.
“The most important thing about Japan is kata—a way of doing things in a particular way. There is a natural tendency to do things in a certain way and there is a desire to protect their culture, so eventually I knew I had to leave,” reflected Maric on her leap from Toyota to the U.S. start-up world.
Recruited to lead a battery fuel research group in Vancouver, Maric eventually headed to Connecticut—a state with long-established defense and manufacturing industries, in which the university now plays a crucial research role.
“Since 2010 the state has been recruiting faculty in renewable and environmental sustainability, including CO2 capture, so I’ve been part of this, but the history of manufacturing goes back to the mid-19th century when bicycle companies had their first factories in Connecticut,” Maric said.
Her university’s willingness to recruit someone with an eclectic CV—including stints in corporate R&D, academia and start-ups covering three continents—then promote them to the top job is a good example of why American academia will continue to thrive, despite the current challenges, Maric said.
“I am not a traditional person, but I was always a hard worker who sought to improve myself and bring people along with me whenever I could. Not many foreigners—whatever their expertise or experience—will become university presidents, but it is possible in America,” she said.
The UNC system doesn’t have a policy that specifies how syllabi are treated under open-records laws.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Liudmila Chernetska and Davizro/iStock/Getty Images
As right-wing groups increasingly weaponize Freedom of Information Act requests to expose and dox faculty members who teach about gender, race and diversity, University of North Carolina system campuses are split over whether syllabi and other course materials should be subject to public records requests.
In July, officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill determined that the documents are not automatically subject to such requests after the Oversight Project, founded by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, requested that the university hand over any course materials from more than 70 classes that contained one of 30 words or phrases, including “gender identity,” “intersectionality,” “queer” and “sexuality.” Officials ultimately denied the request, writing, “There are no existing or responsive University records subject to disclosure under the North Carolina Public Records Act. Course materials, including but not limited to exams, lectures, assignments and syllabi, are the intellectual property of the preparer.”
The requested materials are protected by copyright policies, a UNC Chapel Hill spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed. “The university has a longstanding practice of recognizing faculty’s intellectual property rights in course materials and does not reproduce these materials in response to public records requests without first asking for faculty consent,” they wrote in an email.
But an hour’s drive west, at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, officials decided just the opposite. Professors were asked to hand over their spring 2025 syllabi in response to a Freedom of Information Act request earlier this fall, said Chuck Bolton, a professor of history at UNC Greensboro and chair of the Faculty Senate. He is among dozens of faculty members who were asked to upload their syllabi into a central database.
“The Public Records Act is inclusive in its coverage and unless there is an explicit exception, which this is not, it is covered,” UNC Greensboro spokesperson Diana Lawrence said in an email. “As a matter of public policy, transparency should take [precedence] over questions where there is doubt and we do not believe that the Federal Copyright Act provides a specific exemption or preempts what has been passed in state law.”
Which university is interpreting the law correctly? It’s hard to know, said Hugh Stevens, an attorney who specializes in public records and FOIA law and litigation at the law firm Stevens Martin Vaughn & Tadych. There is no case law specific to this question, and the answer likely depends on how different course materials—from lecture notes to syllabi to course descriptions—are defined under the law.
“It’s probably a matter of degree,” Stevens said. “Something that you post online for your class to read, it’s pretty hard to say those are not subject to [public records requests]. But on the other hand, the materials that you use to prepare to teach your class, but which are never published to anybody, are certainly, in my view, copyrightable and proprietary.”
For years, UNC Greensboro put syllabi online as part of an accreditation requirement, said Jeff Jones, a history professor and head of the institution’s American Association of University Professors chapter. After the university’s website was redesigned and accreditation procedures changed, the syllabi were no longer posted.
The UNC system doesn’t have a policy that specifies how syllabi are treated under open-records laws, leaving the decision up to individual campuses. The policy “does not discuss distribution of course materials” and “essentially covers the basic functions and procedures involved with records requests,” said UNC system spokesperson Andy Wallace.
But the system does define copyrightable works, which include coursework produced by faculty members, Wallace added.
Lawrence, the Greensboro spokesperson, did not respond to questions about whether the university’s records request was also from the Oversight Project and whether it has already provided the material. The FOIA request has not been made public, but Bolton, the history professor, believes it’s a narrower request than what UNC Chapel Hill received and that it is focused exclusively on syllabi.
The opposing interpretations of the law from two universities in the same public system have left faculty confused and worried about their safety as right-wing groups rifle through course materials for any terminology they don’t like, usually related to gender identity, sexuality or race. Faculty members at Texas A&M University, the University of Houston and George Mason University, among others, have been targeted and sometimes threatened on social media for their instruction and teaching materials. Bolton said he knows of several UNC Greensboro faculty members who have been doxed.
“Faculty have been upset and scared and freaked out about it, because there are people that seem to be [making FOIA requests] because they are trying to create gotcha moments by taking certain things out of context,” he said.
Michael Palm, an associate professor of media and technology studies and cultural studies at UNC Chapel Hill, said in an email that while many faculty are glad Chapel Hill decided not to release the requested course materials, some expressed frustration about the lack of transparency. “We were disappointed when we learned through news reports that UNC Chapel Hill’s lawyers had decided not to respond to the requests, rather than having that decision communicated to us by administrators,” he said.
Some professors are also concerned about how long and how vigorously the university will continue to protect faculty. “We are all concerned about the increasing political interference into our classrooms and attempts to quash our academic freedom,” said Erik Gellman, a history professor at Chapel Hill.
Bolton, at UNC Greensboro, has similar worries.
“This is a tough time for universities,” he said. “There are a lot of attacks coming from a lot of different directions, and that increases the anxiety and anger on behalf of the faculty, because we know that these kinds of things are not being done just because people want to find out what’s on our syllabus for intellectual reasons. They’re doing it for more nefarious reasons.”
Last week I and several colleagues visited a local technical high school to see what kind of dual-enrollment courses we could offer there. The school was leaps and bounds beyond what technical high schools were known for when I was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I’d be proud to have them here.
That said, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern that hasn’t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.
The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they’ve seen, they responded that it was.
This week I dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98 percent of the dental hygienists in our state are women. Strikingly, she noted that the few men in the field have a terrible time getting hired; dentists are afraid that patients will mistake male hygienists for dentists.
This, in 2025.
In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn’t encourage it and, in some cases, tried actively to counter it. That has been true for years. Yet the patterns persist; if anything, they seem to be strengthening in certain occupational areas.
It’s not news that women have been graduating college at higher rates than men for several decades now. But if you looked only at HVAC and cybersecurity programs, you wouldn’t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you’d wonder how the percentage of men even hits double digits. The disjuncture between greater integration in certain professional fields and markedly persistent segregation in others is striking.
Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have expected to see much more integration by now. Maybe not parity, but something far closer to it than what we have now. And the fact that the patterns exist among current high school students suggests that it isn’t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another.
My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That’s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn’t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there’s often a threshold of representation beneath which folks who might otherwise have wanted to be there will feel unwelcome. That threshold is usually well below absolute parity, but above being the “only.”
Having enough people like you—however defined—in the field can make the option seem more welcoming.
So, no, I don’t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn’t likely to lead anywhere good. But surely we can make headway toward making more choices more welcoming for more types of people. We know that having too much sameness in a group leads to groupthink and that groups with multiple perspectives tend to make better decisions. The same can be said of professions. I didn’t think we’d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.
