Tag: Higher

  • Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky

    Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky

    One of the consequences of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been a vast reconfiguring of Russia’s academic and intellectual life. Universities, thought of as a potential hotbed of opposition since the White Ribbon movement of 2011, came under intense control and its personnel placed under even greater scrutiny.

    Many faculty fled. Connections with international partners in the West were severed. And then to top it off, the Russian government announced that it would abandon the three degree bachelor’s, master’s doctoral system introduced when the country joined the Bologna Process 20 years earlier.

    All this has combined to create what some have called a slow motion collapse in Russian higher education. But to understand what’s been happening in Russian Universities since February 2022, you really need to go back to the dawn of the Putin era in January 2000, and understand how ideological control of institutions has come to rest squarely inside the Kremlin.

    Joining the podcast today is Dmitry Dubrovsky. He’s a scholar at the Institute for International Studies at Charles University in Prague, where he has taught ever since being designated as a foreign agent by the Putin regime in early 2022. And he writes primarily about the politics of academic freedom and civil society in Russia.

    He’s with us today to talk about this slow motion collapse, the internal governance of Russian institutions, and how the country might one day be put back on a track to integration with European academia. Over to Dmitry.

    The World of Higher Education Podcast
    Episode 4.5 | Undoing Bologna: Russia’s Conservative Turn in Higher Education with Dmitry Dubrovsky

    Transcript

    Alex Usher (AU): Dmitry, I want to take us back to the year 2000. Vladimir Putin is the new president of the Russian Federation. What was the state of the higher education sector at the time, and how did Putin approach it? How did he view higher education as an instrument of state policy?

    Dmitry Dubrovsky (DD): Well, the legacy of the 1990s left Putin with a serious challenge. The system faced underfunding and fragmentation. At the same time, scholars were eager to join the European system. There had been attempts in the 1990s, but the biggest problems were the lack of financing and the absence of international mechanisms or tools to fully integrate into the European system of higher education and science.

    Putin saw higher education and science, first and foremost, as a tool to join Europe—to become part of the European family and a prominent member of the global market of ideas. That’s why Russia joined the Bologna Process in 2003 and actively pushed for internationalization.

    AU: So in that sense, it’s probably not that different from most other countries in the former socialist bloc, like Poland or Romania—the idea that internationalization would bring about an improvement in higher education. Is that about right?

    DD: It is right, with one very important difference. At first it might seem small, but it became a very serious issue. In higher education and science, everywhere in the world, there are always people who believe that their own system is highly advanced—at the very top.

    The problem in the late Soviet Union and the Russian Federation was that a substantial number of people survived the collapse of the USSR still believing that Russian and Soviet science was the most advanced in the world. In some cases, for certain disciplines, that might have been true. But in most areas—especially the humanities and social sciences—it wasn’t.

    By the late 1990s, there was a substantial group of people who were deeply disappointed in the results of democratic reforms and in what democracy had brought, both to the country overall and to higher education and science in particular.

    AU: Okay, now, Putin was president until 2008, and then he switched places for four years with Prime Minister Medvedev. He returns to power as president in 2012. And as you say, it’s a different Putin—a much more authoritarian Putin. How did his approach to higher education change? If we think of “Putin 1.0” around 2000, what does “Putin 2.0” look like after 2012? How does he try to exert greater control over the system?

    DD: It’s important to note that before Putin came back to power, there was a very significant period of reform in Russian higher education. Especially around 2007–2008, reforms were focused on improving quality and gaining international recognition. This was the era of what we call “managerialist modernization.”

    The idea was to select flagship universities that would drive the rest of the system forward into a brighter future.

    AU: And eventually that becomes the 5–100 Project.

    DD: Yes, the 5–100, or “5–2020” project. The goal was that at least five Russian universities should appear in the world rankings. It was a very interesting period because it marked a serious transformation in the sociocultural landscape of Russian higher education.

    For the first time, the so-called “effective managers” entered the system. From the mid-2000s onward, higher education began receiving serious investment from the state, making it appealing to a new managerial class and their approaches. Internationalization advanced, but it went hand in hand with growing managerial control over universities.

    Even before Putin returned in 2012, higher education was already being used as a tool to demonstrate the effectiveness of Russian policy and as an instrument of soft power, particularly through supporting Russian universities in former Soviet countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Tajikistan.

    When Putin came back, however, the situation changed dramatically. What I call the “conservative shift” began—not just in politics broadly, but within higher education and science.

    AU: And some of that has to do with the broader crackdown at the time. I remember there was a lot of pressure on foreign organizations, which made international cooperation more difficult. For example, the government targeted the Open Society Foundations, George Soros’ network that had been active in supporting the social sciences and humanities. There was also a crackdown on things like gender studies and spaces for LGBTQ students.

    Masha Gessen wrote about this in her book The Future is History. Why did that happen at that moment? What was it about Putin that made him say, “This is an area I want to control and push in a more conservative direction”?

    DD: First and foremost, we have to remember the protests of 2011–2012. That was the time of the so-called “white ribbon” movement. It came very close to a revolution, though in the end it never happened—we failed. I was a member of that movement myself.

    The significant participation of scholars and students in those protests put higher education under special scrutiny from the security services and the political apparatus. They believed that control over the education system could restore their legitimacy and symbolic power in society.

    And remember, these leaders were, in many ways, Soviet people. They genuinely believed, “This is how the Soviet Union ruled—through control, especially in education and ideology.” And to some extent, that was true. The Soviet Union consolidated its power in part through universities.

    Putin believed the same could work for him—that restoring control over higher education would allow him to strengthen his government, which had been undermined by the events of 2011–2012.

    AU: We’ve been talking about the relationship between institutions and the government, but the government also changed the way institutions were run a couple of times, right? How has the exercise of power within Russian universities changed? I’m pretty sure there’s been a change in the process of selecting university leaders. How has that affected Putin’s ability to control universities?

    DD: The specificity of Russian universities in the 1990s was that there was an enormous amount of democracy. There was absolutely no money in the system, so it was extremely poor—but at the same time, it was a kind of “poor democracy.” There were numerous elections, and the whole system of university governance was very active in self-governance.

    There were real political struggles. People fought for the position of dean, they competed for the position of rector. Even department chairs could be elected. Almost every administrative position within a Russian university could be filled through an election.

    When Putin consolidated power, especially during the managerial reforms, there was pressure—particularly on the flagship universities in the 5–100 Project—to amend their charters and replace elections with government appointments.

    The official explanation was simple: if the state was providing so much budget support, then the state should also assign the rector rather than leave it to an election.

    Even now, some Russian rectors are still technically elected. But in Putin’s Russia, an “election” is not an election in the normal sense. The ministry proposes the candidate, people watch the process, and it ends up looking very much like the way Putin himself is “elected.”

    AU: Dmitry, in the early days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, one thing that surprised a lot of people in the West—it seemed to come out of the blue—was a letter in support of the invasion signed by several hundred university rectors. Why did they do that? I mean, presumably they were ordered to by Putin, but why did Putin think that would be legitimizing?

    DD: In post-Soviet societies there is a very high level of trust in higher education and science. The leaders of higher education were expected to officially support the so-called “hard decision” about the war.

    But it’s important to remember—something some of our colleagues abroad seem to forget—that most of these rectors were never democratically chosen. They do not represent the voices of Russian scholars, lecturers, or faculty members. They mostly represent the vision of the presidential administration. Their role was to collect names for a list of support and then sign this shameful document.

    And of course, this didn’t start in 2022. Under the “foreign agent” law of 2015, the government began a long anti-Western campaign—searching for “un-American” groups of influence, cutting connections with international centers, and declaring institutions like Central European University or Bard College in New York to be “undesirable organizations.”

    This created a climate of fear and anxiety among the leaders of higher education. And there was direct blackmail: if you decided not to sign, that was your choice—but you had to think about your faculty, your team, your colleagues. They would probably be fired soon.

    AU: What changed on university campuses after the invasion? Obviously, if I were in Putin’s position, I’d be worried about student unrest. So what happened in terms of surveillance on campus, and how did faculty react? I mean, you were a faculty member at the time, and you’re one of many who left fairly quickly after the invasion. How big a brain drain was there?

    DD: Not as big as you might think, for different reasons. Academics can’t move as easily as other people—they need to be sure they’ll have a way to continue working, and for many there simply wasn’t anywhere to settle quickly.

    My personal story was different. By coincidence, I had an invitation for a fellowship. Long story short, I relocated quickly from my home city of St. Petersburg to Prague. But for many others, leaving was far more difficult.

    As for institutional surveillance—yes, it was there. It looks like Russia had been preparing for war for about two years beforehand. Around two years before the invasion, they started introducing special vice rectors responsible for “youth” whose actual role was to monitor and control loyalty.

    At the same time, they established special departments within Russian universities with very long titles—things like “Promoting Civic Consciousness, Preventing Extremism, and Managing Interethnic Relations.” In practice, these were institutions embedded in higher education to control and discipline students and scholars.

    Their real work was searching social networks, looking for so-called “betrayal” behaviors among students and faculty, and reporting them to the security services and police. Today, almost every region of the Russian Federation has one of these departments to oversee and report on improper behavior.

    AU: After that rectors’ letter, Russia was suspended from the Bologna Process, and in retaliation Putin announced a return to the pre-Bologna system. So, getting rid of the bachelor’s, master’s, PhD framework and bringing back the old Russian model with the second PhD. How is this process unfolding? How easy is it to undo Bologna?

    DD: That’s a good question. I don’t think Russia is really going to undo Bologna. They’re not planning a full reversal or trying to recreate the Soviet path.

    From one side, there’s direct pressure on the Ministry of Higher Education and its bureaucrats to dramatically change a system that has been built over twenty years. But this system cannot simply be reversed. Legally, if students have already been admitted to a particular program, the state can’t just stop it midstream. At the very least, it would take four or five years to change. It can’t happen overnight.

    Secondly, to me this feels like an exercise in mimicry or emulation from the old Soviet-style bureaucratic circles in higher education. I follow what’s happening closely—the statements from the Minister of Education—and they always try to explain what will be different, but they can’t. They have no clear idea what they’re trying to create.

    Officially, they say, “This is not Bologna anymore. It has proved to be ineffective. Now we will collect the best achievements of the Russian system of education.” But what does that even mean? It’s absolutely impossible to understand. From my perspective, they are trying more to sabotage the process than to implement something substantial.

    AU: Looking ahead, what do you think a post-Putin higher education system in Russia might look like? Is there a path back into the European higher education space, and what would it take to undo the damage that’s been done since 2012?

    DD: That’s a good question. Currently, I would describe the situation as a “fourth deglobalization.” We’ve essentially gone back to the conditions of 2003, before joining the Bologna Process.

    That doesn’t mean there’s no capacity—many faculty members still working in Russia earned their degrees in Western institutions. There is still substantial expertise within the system. But the fate of Russian higher education is very difficult to predict because it is so closely tied to the political fate of the Russian Federation itself.

    If sanctions were to decrease and the war were to end, perhaps things could return to something like “normalcy.” But even that is debatable—what would “normalcy” mean in this context? At best, it might look like the Cold War era, perhaps similar to the late 1970s.

    There are already serious restrictions in place: academic sanctions, boycotts, and bans on cooperation imposed by many institutions and countries. These severely limit Russia’s ability to develop visible academic exchanges with Europe. Instead, Russia is turning elsewhere—towards an “alternative globalization,” aligning more closely with countries like China, Iran, South Africa, and Brazil within the BRICS framework, [a political and economic bloc of major emerging economies that positions itself as an alternative to Western-led alliances].

    AU: Dmitry, thank you so much for being with us today. It just remains for me to thank our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and you, our listeners, for joining us. If you have any questions or comments on this week’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].

    Join us next week when our guest will be Joshua Travis Brown from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. He’ll be joining us to talk about his fascinating new book from Oxford University Press, Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin Obsessed. Bye for now.

    *This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service. Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.

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  • How AI Can Smooth College Credit Transfer

    How AI Can Smooth College Credit Transfer

    Upward transfer is viewed as a mechanism to provide college students with an accessible and affordable on-ramp to higher education through two-year colleges, but breakdowns in the credit-transfer process can hinder a student’s progress toward their degree.

    A recent survey by Sova and the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board found the average college student loses credits transferring between institutions and has to repeat courses they’ve already completed. Some students stop out of higher education altogether because transfer is too challenging.

    CourseWise is a new tool that seeks to mitigate some of these challenges by deploying AI to identify and predict transfer equivalencies using existing articulation agreements between institutions. So far, the tool, part of the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network, has been adopted at over 120 colleges and universities, helping to provide a centralized database for credit-transfer processes and automate course matching.

    In the most recent episode of Voices of Student Success, host Ashley Mowreader speaks with Zachary Pardos, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, about how CourseWise works, the human elements of credit transfer and the need for reliable data in transfer.

    An edited version of the podcast appears below.

    Q: As someone who’s been in the education-technology space for some time, can you talk about this boom of ed-tech applications for AI? It seems like it popped up overnight, but you and your colleagues are a testament to the fact that it’s been around for decades.

    Zach Pardos, associate professor at UC Berkeley and the developer of CourseWise

    A: As soon as a chat interface to AI became popularized, feasible, plausible and useful, it opened up the space to a lot of people, including those who don’t necessarily have a computer science background. So in a way, it’s great. You get a lot more accessibility to this kind of application and work. But there have also been precepts—things that the field has learned, things that people have learned who’ve been working in this space for a while—and you don’t want to have to repeat all those same errors. And in many ways, even though the current generation of AI is different in character, a lot of those same precepts and missteps still apply here.

    Q: What is your tool CourseWise and why is it necessary in the ed-tech space?

    A: CourseWise is a spinoff of our higher education and AI work from UC Berkeley. It is meant to be a credit-mobility accelerator for students and institutions. It’s needed because the greatest credit-mobility machine in America, the thing that gets families up in socioeconomic status, is education. And it’s the two-year–to–four-year transition often that does that, where you can start at a more affordable school that gives two-year associate’s degrees and then transition to a four-year school.

    But that pathway often breaks down. It’s often too expensive to maintain, and so for there to be as many pathways as possible that are legitimate between institutions, between learning experiences, basically acknowledging what a student has learned and not making them do it again, requires us to embrace technology.

    Q: Can you talk more about the challenges with transfer and where course equivalency and transfer pipelines can break down in the transition between the two- and four-year institutions?

    A: Oftentimes, when a student applies to transfer, they’ll have their transcript evaluated [by the receiving institution], and it’ll be evaluated against existing rules.

    Sometimes, when it’s between institutions that have made an effort to establish robust agreements, the student will get most of their credit accepted. But in instances where there aren’t such strong ties, there’s going to be a lot of credit that gets missed, and if the rules don’t exist, if the institution does go through the extra effort, or the student requests extra effort to consider credit that hasn’t been considered before, this can be a very lengthy process.

    Sometimes that decision doesn’t get made until after the student’s first or second semester, semesters in which they maybe had to decide whether or not to take such a course. So it really is a matter of not enough acknowledgment of existing courses and then that process to acknowledge the equivalency of past learning being a bit too slow to best serve a learner.

    Q: Yeah. Attending a two-year college with the hopes of earning a bachelor’s degree is designed to help students save time and money. So it’s frustrating to hear that some of these students are not getting their transfer equivalencies semesters into their progress at the four-year, because that’s time and energy lost.

    A: Absolutely. It’s unfortunately, in many cases, a false promise that this is the cheaper way to go, and it ends up, in many cases, being more expensive.

    Q: We can talk about the transfer pipeline a lot, but I’ll say one more thing: The free marketplace of higher education and the idea that a student can transfer anywhere is also broken down by a lack of transfer-articulation agreements, where the student’s credits aren’t recognized or they’re only recognized in part. That really hinders the student’s ability to say, “This is where I want to go to college,” because they’re subject to the whims of the institutions and their agreements between each other.

    A: That’s right, and it’s not really an intentional [outcome]. However, systems that have a power dynamic often have a tendency not to change, and that resistance to change, kind of implicitly, is a commitment not to serve students correctly.

    Accreditors Weigh In

    The Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions (C-RAC) supports the exploration and application of AI solutions within learning evaluation and credit transfer, according to a forthcoming statement from the group to be released Oct. 6. Three accrediting commissions, MSCHE, SACSCOC and WSCUC, are holding a public webinar conversation to discuss transfer and learning mobility, with a focus on AI and credit transfer on Oct. 6. Learn more here.

    So what you do need is a real type of intervention. Because it’s not in any one spot, you could argue, and you could also make the argument that every institution is so idiosyncratic in its processes that you would have to do a separate study at every institution to figure out, “OK, how do we fix things here?” But what our research is showing on the Berkeley end is that there are regularities. There are patterns in which credit is evaluated, and where you could modify that workflow to both better serve the institution, so it’s not spending so many resources on manually considering equivalencies, and serve the student better by elevating opportunities for credit acceptance in a more efficient way.

    That’s basically what CourseWise is. It’s meant to be an intervention that serves the institution and serves the student by recognizing these common patterns to credit acceptance and leveraging AI to alleviate the stress and friction that currently exists in affording that credit.

    Q: Can you walk us through where CourseWise fits into the workflow? How does it work practically?

    A: CourseWise is evolving in its feature set and has a number of exciting features ahead, which maybe we’ll get to later. But right now, the concrete features are that on the administrator side, on the staff or admissions department side, you upload an institution’s existing articulation agreements—so if you’re a four-year school, it’s your agreements to accept credit from two-year schools.

    So then, when you receive transcripts from prospective transfer students, the system will evaluate that transcript to tell you which courses match existing rules of yours, where you’ve guaranteed credit, and then it’ll also surface courses that don’t already have an agreement.

    If there’s a high-confidence AI match, it’ll bring that to the administrator’s attention and say, “You should consider this, and here’s why.” It’ll also bring to their attention, “Here’s peer institutions of yours that have already accepted that course as course-to-course credit.”

    A screenshot of the CourseWise software, showing a query course, Math 270: Linear Algebra, and how it compares to the equivalent courses on Linear Algebra.

    CourseWise compares classes in institutions’ catalogs to identify existing agreements for credit transfer and possible course-to-course transfers to improve student outcomes.

    Q: Where are you getting that peer-to-peer information from?

    A: We think of CourseWise as a network, and that information on what peer institutions are doing is present. We have a considerable number of institutions from the same system. California is one—we have 13 California institutions, and we’re working on more. The other is State University of New York, SUNY. We have the SUNY system central participating in a pilot. It’ll be up to the individual institutions to adopt the usage. But we have data at the system-center level, and because of that centralized data, we are able to say, for every SUNY institution that’s considering one of the AI credit acceptance requests, give that context of, “Here are other four-year peer institutions within your system that already accept this—not just as generic elective credit, but accept it as perhaps degree satisfying, or at least course-to-course credit.”

    Q: That’s awesome; I’m sure it’s a time saver. But where do the faculty or staff members come back into the equation, to review what the AI produced or to make sure that those matches are appropriate?

    A: Faculty are a critical part of the governance of credit equivalency in different systems. They have different roles; often it’s assumed that faculty approve individual courses. That’s true in most cases. Sometimes it’s committees; different departments will have a committee of faculty, or they may even have a campus standing committee that considers this curricular committee that makes those decisions.

    But what CourseWise is doing right now to incorporate faculty appropriately is we’re allowing for the institution to define what is that approval workflow and the rules around that. If it’s a lower-division statistics class, can your admission staff make that decision on acceptability, even if it’s not existing in a current agreement?

    Under what circumstances does it need to be routed to a faculty member to approve? What kind of information should be provided to that faculty member if they don’t have it, making it easy to request information, like requesting a syllabus be uploaded by the sending institution or something to that effect?

    Oftentimes, this kind of approval workflow is done through a series of emails, and so we’re trying to internalize that and increase the transparency. You have different cases that get resolved with respect to pairs of courses, and you can see that case. You can justify why a decision was made, and it can be revisited if there’s a rebuttal to that decision.

    Now, over time, what we hope the field can see as a potential is perhaps for certain students, let’s say, coming from out of state; it’s more a faculty committee who gives feedback to a kind of acceptance algorithm that is then able to make a call, and they can veto that call. But it creates a default; like with ChatGPT, there’s an alignment committee that helps give feedback to ChatGPT answers so that it is better in line with what most users find to be a high-quality response. Because there’s no way that we can proactively, manually accept or evaluate every pair of institutions to one another in the United States—there’s just no FTE count that would allow for that, which means that prospective students from out of state can’t get any guarantee if we keep it with that approach.

    Faculty absolutely have control. We’re setting up the whole workflow so an institution can define that. But one of the options we want to give institutions is the option to say, “Well, if the student is coming from out of state or coming from this or that system, you can default to a kind of faculty-curated AI policy.”

    Q: That’s cool. I’ve heard from some colleges that they have full teams of staff who just review transcripts every single day. Having a centralized database where you can see past experiences of which courses have been accepted or rejected—that can save so much time and energy. And that’s not even half of what CourseWise is doing.

    A: Absolutely, and we work closely with leadership and these institutions to get feedback. And one of the people involved in that early feedback is Isaiah Vance at the Texas A&M University system, and he’s given us similar feedback where, if you have a new registrar or a new leadership that comes in, and they want to know how good the data is, they want that kind of transparency of how were decisions made, if you have that transparency in that organization to look that over, it can really help an institution get comfortable with those past decisions or decide how they should change in the future.

    Q: What are some of the outcomes you’ve seen or the feedback you’ve heard from institutions that are using the tool?

    A: We have a study that we’re about to embark upon to measure a before-and-after change in how institutions are doing business and how much it’s saving time or not, versus a control of not having the system when making these decisions.

    We don’t have the results of that yet. We do have a paper out on where articulation officers, for example, are spending their time. They’re spending a lot of time on looking for the right course that might articulate. So we definitely have identified there is a problem. It’s an open question to what degree CourseWise is remedying that. We certainly are working nonstop to remedy it, but we’re going to measure that rigorously over the next year.

    Some early feedback is positive, but also interesting that institutions, many of them, are spending a lot of time getting that initial data uploaded, catalog descriptions, articulations and the rigorousness and validity of that data. Maybe it’s spread across a number of Excel spreadsheets at some institutions—that problem is real—and so I think it’s going to take a field-level or industry-level effort to make sure that everyone can be on board with that data-wrangling stage.

    Q: That was my hypothesis, that the tool has a lot of benefits once everything’s all set up and they’ve done the labor of love to hunt down and upload all these documents, find out which offices they’re hiding behind.

    A: There are a number of private foundations, funders who are invested in that particular area. So I’m optimistic that there’s a solution out there and that we’ll be a part of that.

    Q: I wonder if we can talk about how this tool can improve the student experience with transfer and what it means to have these efficiencies and database to lean back on.

    A: Right now, most of the activity is with the four-year schools, because they’re the ones uploading the articulations. They’re the ones evaluating transcripts. But in the next four months, we’re releasing a student-facing planner, which will directly affect students at the sending institutions.

    This planner will allow a student who’s at a community college to choose what destination school and major they’re interested in that’s part of the CourseWise network. Then [CourseWise provides] what courses they need to take, or options of courses to take that will transfer into the degree program that they’re seeking, such that when they transfer, they would only have to do the equivalent of two full years of academic work at that receiving school.

    It would also let them know what other majors at other institutions they may want to consider because of how much of the credit that they’ve already taken is accepted into the degree programs there. So the student may be 20 percent of the way in completing their initially intended destination program, but maybe they’re 60 percent of the way to another program that they didn’t realize.

    Q: What’s next for CourseWise?

    A: So the student part is the navigation, the administrator articulation expansion and policy for expansion is creating the pathways; you need a GPS in order to know what the paths are and how to traverse them as a learner. But also states—I mentioned regularities—there are commonalities in how these processes take place, but there’s also very specific state-level concerns and structures, like common course numbering, credit for prior learning, an emphasis on community colleges accepting professional certificate programs and so forth.

    I think the future is both increasing that student-facing value, helping with achievement from the student point of view. But then also leveraging the fundamental AI equivalency engine and research to bring in these other ways of acknowledging credit, whether it’s AP credit or job-training credit or certificates or cross-walking between all these different ways in which higher education chooses to speak about learning, right?

    If you have a requirement satisfied in general education in California, how do you bring that to New York, given New York’s general education requirements? Are there crosswalks that can be suggested and established with the aid of AI? And I’m excited about connecting these different sorts of dialects of education using technology.

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  • Missouri President Wants Local Officials to Address Crime

    Missouri President Wants Local Officials to Address Crime

    University of Missouri president Mun Choi is pressing local officials about crime rates near the Columbia campus after a student from neighboring Stephens College died Sunday following a downtown shooting, KCUR and the Columbia Missourian reported. 

    The president’s demand to address the city’s “rampant crime rate” has gathered some support, but critics say that his characterization of the local climate is overexaggerated, pointing to data from the local police department.

    The shooting, which also resulted in serious injuries to two others, took place early Saturday morning on the college town’s main street. One individual, not from the city, got into a verbal dispute and then opened fire toward the people he was confronting. The three individuals he hit, however, were bystanders.    

    In a letter sent the same day as the shooting, Choi called on city and county leaders to bolster the police presence and prosecute crimes to the fullest extent of the law. He also urged them to take down encampments of unhoused individuals, pass a loitering notice and repeal policies that “attract criminals to the region.”  

    But when asked during a press conference Monday what policies and practices he believes “attract criminals,” the MU president said he had none to cite. Neither the shooter in the Saturday incident nor any of the victims have been identified as unhoused, according to local reporting.

    “That is why I am asking [local leaders] to evaluate the processes that we have and the practices,” he explained. “Are we giving the impression to potential criminals that this is a region that doesn’t take crime enforcement as well as the punishment that comes with it seriously?”

    Choi later added that students and local business owners have been raising safety concerns about the city’s unhoused population. According to university data, the number of arrests and trespassing violations issued to the unhoused has “gone up dramatically” since 2019, he said.

    That is different, however, from what some local police department data shows.

    In a Facebook post Monday, the city’s mayor, Barbara Buffaloe, said there have been 58 gunshot incidents since the beginning of the year. That’s down from 105 in the first nine months of 2024.

    Columbia Police Department chief Jill Schlude did note in a separate letter, however, that since 2019 more crimes have been concentrated downtown, occurring between midnight and 3 a.m. 

    “The connection between late-night social activity and violence is clear, and that is where we continue to focus our efforts,” Schlude said.

    Regardless of any disputes over the data, multiple government officials—including Gov. Mike Kehoe, several members of the Columbia City Council and Mayor Buffaloe—have voiced support for Choi’s general call to improve safety. Buffaloe has also committed to forming a task force on the matter, and the CPD has outlined plans to increase the police presence downtown. 

    “Statistics cannot be used solely as a reason for us to move away from what needs to be done in the city of Columbia,” Choi said.

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  • Lane Community College Board Apologizes to President

    Lane Community College Board Apologizes to President

    The Lane Community College Board of Education apologized to President Stephanie Bulger at its Tuesday meeting for how members disrespected her on the basis of her race and sex, Lookout Eugene-Springfield reported. 

    The board’s apology follows the findings of an investigative report released in August that determined board members were frequently dismissive of Bulger—a Black woman—and often deferred questions to male staff members. The report found that former board chair Zach Mulholland was frequently hostile toward Bulger and often cut her off in their interactions. (He was also found to have physically intimidated a student at a board meeting.) Although Mulholland was censured by the board last month, he has resisted calls to step down.

    Much of the report focused on Mulholland, but other members were also implicated.

    “The board recognizes and is accountable for the harm caused to you, President Bulger,” said Austin Fölnagy, the current board chair, who was also accused of dismissive behavior. “We are deeply sorry for the negative impact our behavior has had on you and the college community at large. President Bulger, please accept the board’s apology for treating you badly.” 

    He added that the board is “committed to learning from our shortcomings” and will take “remedial actions including training in bias, discrimination and harassment” this fiscal year.

    Bulger has been president of the Oregon community college since July 2022.

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  • UNC Professor on Leave After Alleged Advocacy of Political Violence

    UNC Professor on Leave After Alleged Advocacy of Political Violence

    Dixon has faced blowback for his political activism before and remained in his role at UNC.

    Eros Hoagland/Getty Images

    Officials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill placed Professor Dwayne Dixon on leave Monday while the university investigates his “alleged advocacy of politically motivated violence,” said Dean Stoyer, UNC Chapel Hill’s vice chancellor for communications and marketing.

    Dixon, an associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, used to be a member of Silver Valley Redneck Revolt, a chapter of the antifascist, antiracist, anticapitalist political group Redneck Revolt. The group was formed in 2016 and some members, including Dixon, were present at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., to provide armed security and medical assistance to counterprotesters. Redneck Revolt disbanded in 2019 and has no active chapters, according to its website.

    In a 2018 interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dixon described himself as an “anarchist,” and he is no stranger to blowback for his political activism and support for gun rights. He was arrested for bringing a semiautomatic rifle to a Ku Klux Klan counterprotest in Durham, N.C., in 2018—the case was later dismissed as unconstitutional on the grounds that the charges violated Dixon’s First and Second Amendment rights. He was also among 20 people who protected counterprotesters in Durham when white supremacists protested the removal of a Confederate statue in 2017. Through all these events, Dixon remained employed at UNC Chapel Hill.

    Why is Dixon in the hot seat now? The answer is convoluted, but it begins with fliers on the Georgetown University campus.

    On Sept. 24, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, posted on X a photo of a flier on the Georgetown campus in Washington, D.C., that read, “Hey Fascist! Catch!”—a nod to engraving on the casing of bullets left behind by Kirk’s suspected killer—and “The only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.” The flier also included a QR code to a Google form for a potential Georgetown chapter of the John Brown Gun Club, a Redneck Revolt affiliate organization known as a “leftist gun-rights group” with multiple independent chapters, including one in the D.C. area, according to the Counter Extremism Project. It “arms itself to defend against far-right violence and often appears as a security force at protests to protect against expected far-right violence,” the CEP wrote. Google has since removed the form for violating its terms of service.

    University officials removed the fliers and reported them to the FBI. Education Secretary Linda McMahon also weighed in: “At a moment like this, Georgetown has to determine what it stands for as an institution … Allowing violent rhetoric to fester on our nation’s campuses without consequences is dangerous. It must be condemned by institutional leaders,” she wrote on X. “I am grateful to those who spoke out against this and made noise about the posters on campus—you made a difference. There is power in speaking up to reveal these hateful ideologies that have incited deadly violence.”

    Kolvet posted again, this time linking to a recent Fox News article that cited Dixon’s involvement in Redneck Revolt based on an old blog post that has since been taken down. “I posted this flyer our team spotted at Georgetown University, and now we find out professors at ‘elite’ schools are members of this group and its offshoots,” Kolvet wrote. “This professor must be immediately fired and the group/network investigated.”

    Dixon was placed on leave Monday, which will “allow the University to investigate these allegations in a manner that protects the integrity of its assessment,” UNC’s Stoyer said in his statement. “Depending upon the nature and circumstances of this activity, this conduct could be grounds for disciplinary action up to and including potential termination of employment.”

    UNC Chapel Hill officials declined to answer any other questions about Dixon and did not say whether Kolvet’s post or the Fox News article led to the investigation. Dixon did not reply to a request for comment but told the student newspaper The Daily Tarheel that he left the Silver Valley Redneck Revolt in 2018.

    A Change.org petition to reinstate Dixon is circulating and as of Wednesday evening had more than 900 signatures. In a statement Wednesday, the North Carolina chapter of the American Association of University Professors, as well as UNC Chapel Hill’s AAUP president, condemned the university’s actions and demanded Dixon be reinstated.

    “Right-wing activists are attacking Dixon for prior membership in a group that has been inactive since 2019, and are baselessly connecting him to flyers allegedly posted by a different group on a different campus outside of North Carolina. Fox News picked up the story on September 27, 2025, without verifying the existence of the flyers, and apparently this was enough for UNC’s administration to remove a professor from the classroom in the middle of the semester and bar him from campus,” the statement read. “Let’s call this what it is: UNC administrators are capitulating to a call from a right-wing group, infamous for attacking faculty, to fire a professor based on an unsubstantiated rumor.”

    Dixon joins the ranks of dozens of college and university faculty members who have been placed on leave, disciplined or fired in the weeks since Kirk was shot and killed. All of these professors have been investigated after right-wing personalities identified them on social media. Two of them—Michael Hook, who was placed on leave for social media comments he made about Kirk’s death, and Thomas Alter, who was terminated after being accused of inciting violence during a speech—have been reinstated by court orders.

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  • How Credit for Prior Learning Strengthens Workforce Ties

    How Credit for Prior Learning Strengthens Workforce Ties

    In today’s rapidly evolving workforce landscape, higher education institutions face mounting pressure to demonstrate value, relevance and return on investment. Amid this challenge lies an underutilized strategy with remarkable potential: credit for prior learning.

    We’ve long recognized CPL’s benefits for students. Learners who receive CPL credits are more likely to complete their degrees (49 percent vs. 27 percent for those without) and, on average, they earn 17.6 additional credits, finish nine to 14 months sooner and save between $1,500 and $10,200 in tuition costs (CAEL). But what’s often overlooked is CPL’s power to transform relationships between educational institutions and employers—creating a win-win-win for students, institutions and industry.

    Beyond a Student Benefit

    The traditional narrative around CPL emphasizes student advantages: increased enrollment, improved completion rates and reduced time to graduation. These metrics matter tremendously, but they tell only part of the story.

    CPL can serve as a bridge between academia and industry, creating powerful new partnerships. When colleges and universities embrace robust CPL programs, they send a clear message to employers: We value the training and development you provide. Recognizing corporate training as creditworthy learning demonstrates respect for workplace knowledge and underscores higher education’s commitment to real-world relevance.

    Employer and Workforce Gains

    For employers, CPL validates that their internal training programs have academic merit. This recognition strengthens recruitment and retention efforts, as workers see clear pathways to advance their education without duplicating learning they’ve already mastered. Companies that invest in employee development also gain educational partners who understand industry needs and value the attributes that drive employee success.

    The benefits extend further: Organizations with tuition remission or reimbursement programs can reduce costs while enhancing employee motivation and persistence.

    Deeper Collaboration Between Higher Ed and Industry

    As institutions evaluate workplace training for credit equivalency, they gain invaluable insights into industry practices and skill needs. This exchange allows colleges to refine curricula to better meet market demand, ensuring graduates possess the competencies employers seek—not just those defined within academic silos.

    The hard but necessary conversations—between faculty and corporate training leaders—help ensure CPL evaluations are rigorous and relevant. Key questions include: Why include certain topics but not others? How do we know participants can demonstrate knowledge? Does the training align with broader disciplinary or leadership needs, or is it niche? These discussions strengthen both educational and workplace outcomes.

    Reimagining CPL

    The future of higher education lies in breaking down artificial barriers between academic and workplace learning. By embracing CPL as a cornerstone strategy—not only for student success but also for employer partnerships—institutions can position themselves at the nexus of education and employment.

    This approach doesn’t diminish academic rigor; it expands our understanding of where and how meaningful learning occurs. Done well, CPL creates pathways that honor all learning, regardless of where it happens. And for learners, the message is clear: Your hard work counts.

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  • Contextualizing Completion Gaps for First-Gen Students

    Contextualizing Completion Gaps for First-Gen Students

    First-generation students are twice as likely to leave college without completing a bachelor’s degree than their peers, even if they come from higher-income backgrounds and come to college academically prepared, according to a new report from the Common App. The findings suggest these factors do make a difference for student success outcomes but don’t erase other barriers first-generation students might face.

    The report, released Thursday and the fourth in a series on first-generation students, used data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center to track enrollment, persistence and completion rates for 785,300 Common App applicants in the 2016–17 application cycle. (Students whose parents didn’t complete bachelor’s degrees made up 32 percent of the sample.) The report also took into account how a range of factors could affect student outcomes, including students’ incomes, their levels of academic preparation and how well-resourced their colleges are.

    Previous studies have shown that “first-generation students are certainly not a monolith,” said Sarah Nolan, lead author of the report and a research scientist at Common App. “We were hoping to give readers a sense for … which first-generation students might in particular need more support.”

    The good news is the report found first-generation applicants enroll in college at rates on par with their peers. Over 90 percent of Common App applicants, first-generation and otherwise, enrolled in college within six years of applying.

    But first-generation students were slightly more likely to not enroll immediately (17 percent) or to enroll at a two-year college (12 percent) compared to other applicants (14 percent and 4 percent, respectively). That gap mostly closed when comparing students with strong academic records, defined as having SAT or ACT scores or GPAs in the top quartile. According to the report, that finding may be because a higher share of first-generation students may need extra coursework before enrolling in a four-year institution.

    Students might also work to save up for college first or opt for community colleges’ more affordable tuition rates, the report suggested. Lower-income first-generation students, who qualified for application fee waivers, were also less likely to immediately enroll at four-year institutions and more likely to first enroll at a community college compared to similar students not from first-generation backgrounds.

    Over all, “we are really heartened to see that there’s really not very strong differences in college enrollment,” Nolan said.

    Completion rates, however, are another story. While about 70 percent of first-generation students do complete a bachelor’s degree within six years of enrolling, the report found stark disparities between them and their peers.

    About half of first-generation students completed a bachelor’s degree within four years, compared to 68 percent of continuing-generation students, a gap of 18 percentage points. And that disparity persisted when looking at six-year graduation rates. About 69 percent of first-generation students graduated within six years, compared to 86 percent of continuing-generation students, a 17-percentage-point difference.

    These gaps shrank but didn’t disappear for first-generation students with strong academic records and higher incomes. Academically prepared first-generation students were twice as likely to disenroll with no degree than their continuing-generation counterparts, 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively. In a similar vein, 24 percent of higher-income first-generation students left college without a degree within six years compared to 12 percent of their continuing-generation counterparts. Even for first-generation students who were both academically prepared and relatively well-off, these gaps remained.

    Differences in the institutions first-generation and continuing-generation students attend—and the levels of supports they offer—didn’t account for completion-rate gaps, either.

    Even when attending the exact same institutions, first-generation students were 10 percentage points less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree within six years than continuing-generation students.

    However, higher per-student expenditures did seem to contribute to better student success outcomes. At institutions that spent at least $20,000 per student, 84 percent of first-generation graduated within six years, compared to 94 percent of continuing-generation students. The gap between first-generation and continuing-generation students’ completion rates widened to 15 percentage points at colleges that spent more moderately, $10,000 to $15,000 per student, and 17 percentage points at colleges with low per-student expenditures, less than $7,500.

    These findings suggest that, while first-generation students disproportionately face financial constraints and barriers to college prep, it doesn’t explain away their graduation rate gaps. And students attending less resourced institutions isn’t a full explanation, either. Other obstacles must be at play.

    What those barriers are may be “best answered by speaking with first-generation students themselves and unpacking what’s happening at the individual level,” Nolan said. But first-generation students likely struggle with limited access to information about higher ed and its “hidden curriculum” of expectations, regardless of income, high school performance or which college they attend.

    “Having the right resources at the right time on the pathway—that’s really critical for student success,” Nolan added.

    The stakes of success are high—the report found many first-generation students spent considerable time and money on college with no degree to show for it. Almost a third of first-generation students who didn’t earn a degree were enrolled for at least four years.

    But a hopeful finding is that “additional investment can be quite positive for helping these students really actualize their potential,” Nolan said.

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  • The Plight of Gazan Students and Implications for UK Higher Education Policy 

    The Plight of Gazan Students and Implications for UK Higher Education Policy 

    Author:
    Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni

    Published:

    This blog was kindly authored by Ofra Goldstein-Gidoni of the Black Flag Academic Formation. 

    In recent weeks, the plight of Gazan students and scholars accepted to UK universities has gained attention in British and international media. These individuals are recipients of highly competitive scholarships such as Chevening, as well as other academic awards. They have earned their place at some of the most prestigious institutions in the United Kingdom. Their achievements are remarkable by any standard, but especially so given that they were reached under the harshest conditions imaginable: the collapse of Gaza’s educational infrastructure under bombardment, the absence of functioning universities, and the daily struggle for survival amidst man-made famine and starvation, displacement, and violent death. 

    Yet despite this extraordinary resilience, these students faced the risk of losing their places before they could even set foot in the UK. The obstacle was not academic performance or funding but rather a bureaucratic and logistical impasse deriving from the Home Office requirement to provide biometric data. Following the brutal assault by Hamas and other armed organisations on Israeli civilians and military bases on October 7th, 2023 and the horrific devastation Israel has unleashed on the Palestinians in Gaza since, the Visa Application Centre (VAC) in Gaza has been closed, thus preventing biometric processing. 

    Support for Gazan Students 

    As Israeli academics organised under the banner of the Black Flag Action Group, opposed to the ongoing war in Gaza, we mobilised in support of these students. Over 140 signatories, including Israeli students and scholars at British universities as well as Israeli graduates from British universities, urged the UK government to act decisively and inclusively. In our open letter, we stressed that no administrative hurdle should prevent prospective students from taking up the places they have already earned. When laboratories, libraries, lecture halls and archives lie in ruins, the opportunity to study abroad is not just a personal achievement; it constitutes a lifeline for the ongoing intellectual and professional life of Gazan Palestinians. To have denied these students their places would have been to contradict the UK’s own commitments under schemes like Chevening, which are premised on the idea that education can foster leadership, dialogue, and international understanding. 

    Window of Hope and Future Implications 

    On 3 September 2025, the UK government announced that it would expedite visas for Chevening scholars and others to travel to a third country for biometric processing. We were also very relieved to hear that a group of 34 Palestinian students with places at UK universities have safely arrived in the UK to begin their studies after being evacuated from Gaza last week. These are surely welcome steps, but urgent policy questions for higher education in the UK still remain, including what seem to be the remaining rules preventing students from Gaza from bringing family members with them. In fact, as recently reported by the BBC at least four mothers and one father have so far declined places because they would not leave their children behind. As the recent public discussion shows, these go beyond the immediate emergency and touch on structural issues that universities and government alike must confront: 

    1. Visa and Mobility Frameworks: Current biometric requirements are ill-suited to situations of war and humanitarian crisis. Universities and advocacy groups must press the Home Office to establish flexible, transparent, and accountable procedures for students from conflict zones. 
    2. Equity of Access: Scholarship schemes such as Chevening are designed to promote global leadership. Yet their credibility is undermined if access is contingent not only on merit but also on whether students can survive a war zone and navigate opaque visa procedures. 
    1. Moral Responsibility of universities to students and their dependents: UK institutions that have offered places to Gazan students cannot treat their admission as symbolic. They must actively lobby the government, provide legal and financial assistance, and ensure that students’ right to education is not hollow. 

    The plight of Gazan students is not an abstract problem. It is about gifted men and women who have already demonstrated courage, brilliance, and commitment. Universities, civil society, and policymakers have an ethical obligation to work together to ensure that the promise of higher education for Gazan students in the British system of higher education will not be abandoned at the very moment it is most needed.  

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  • Higher education needs a plan in place for student “pastoral” use of AI

    Higher education needs a plan in place for student “pastoral” use of AI

    With 18 per cent of students reporting mental health difficulties, a figure which has tripled in just seven years, universities are navigating a crisis.

    The student experience can compound many of the risk factors for poor mental health – from managing constrained budgets and navigating the cost of learning crisis, to moving away from established support systems, and balancing high-stakes assessment with course workload and part-time work.

    In response, universities provide a range of free support services, including counselling and wellbeing provision, alongside specialist mental health advisory services. But if we’re honest, these services are under strain. Despite rising expenditure, they’re still often under-resourced, overstretched, and unable to keep pace with growing demand. With staff-student ratios at impossible levels and wait times for therapeutic support often exceeding ten weeks, some students are turning to alternatives for more immediate care.

    And in this void, artificial intelligence is stepping in. While ChatGPT-written essays dominate the sector’s AI discussions, the rise of “pastoral AI” highlights a far more urgent and overlooked AI use case – with consequences more troubling than academic misconduct.

    Affective conversations

    For the uninitiated, the landscape of “affective” or “pastoral” AI is broad. Mainstream tools like Microsoft’s Copilot or OpenAI’s ChatGPT are designed for productivity, not emotional support. Yet research suggests that users increasingly turn to them for exactly that – seeking help with breakups, mental health advice, and other life challenges, as well as essay writing. While affective conversations may account for only a small proportion of overall use (under three per cent in some studies), the full picture is poorly understood.

    Then there are AI “companions” such as Replika or Character.AI – chatbots built specifically for affective use. These are optimised to listen, respond with empathy, offer intimacy, and provide virtual friendship, confidants, or even “therapy”.

    This is not a fringe phenomenon. Replika claims over 25 million users, while Snapchat’s My AI counts more than 150 million. The numbers are growing fast. As the affective capacity of these tools improves, they are becoming some of the most popular and intensively used forms of generative AI – and increasingly addictive.

    A recent report found that users spend an average of 86 minutes a day with AI companions – more than on Instagram or YouTube, and not far behind TikTok. These bots are designed to keep users engaged, often relying on sycophantic feedback loops that affirm worldviews regardless of truth or ethics. Because large language models are trained in part through human feedback, its output is often highly sycophantic – “agreeable” responses which are persuasive and pleasing – but these can become especially risky in emotionally charged conversations, especially with vulnerable users.

    Empathy optimisations

    For students already experiencing poor mental health, the risks are acute. Evidence is emerging that these engagement-at-all-costs chatbots rarely guide conversations to a natural resolution. Instead, their sycophancy can fuel delusions, amplify mania, or validate psychosis.

    Adding to these concerns, legal cases and investigative reporting are surfacing deeply troubling examples: chatbots encouraging violence, sending unsolicited sexual content, reinforcing delusional thinking, or nudging users to buy them virtual gifts. One case alleged a chatbot encouraged a teenager to murder his parents after they restricted his screen time; another saw a chatbot advise a fictional recovering meth addict to take a “small hit” after a bad week. These are not outliers but the predictable by-products of systems optimised for empathy but unbound by ethics.

    And it’s young people who are engaging with them most. More than 70 per cent of companion app users are aged 18 to 35, and two-thirds of Character.AI’s users are 18 to 24 – the same demographic that makes up the majority of our student population.

    The potential harm here is not speculative. It is real and affecting students right now. Yet “pastoral” AI use remains almost entirely absent from higher education’s AI conversations. That is a mistake. With lawsuits now spotlighting cases of AI “encouraged” suicides among vulnerable young people – many of whom first encountered AI through academic use – the sector cannot afford to ignore this.

    Paint a clearer picture

    Understanding why students turn to AI for pastoral support might help. Reports highlight loneliness and vulnerability as key indicators. One found that 17 per cent of young people valued AI companions because they were “always available,” while 12 per cent said they appreciated being able to share things they could not tell friends or family. Another reported that 12 per cent of young people were using chatbots because they had no one else to talk to – a figure that rose to 23 per cent among vulnerable young people, who were also more likely to use AI for emotional support or therapy.

    We talk often about belonging as the cornerstone of student success and wellbeing – with reducing loneliness a key measure of institutional effectiveness. Pastoral AI use suggests policymakers may have much to learn from this agenda. More thinking is needed to understand why the lure of an always-available, non-judgemental digital “companion” feels so powerful to our students – and what that tells us about our existing support.

    Yet AI discussions in higher education remain narrowly focused, on academic integrity and essay writing. Our evidence base reflects this: the Student Generative AI Survey – arguably the best sector-wide tool we have – gives little attention to pastoral or wellbeing-related uses. The result is, however, that data remains fragmented and anecdotal on this area of significant risk. Without a fuller sector-specific understanding of student pastoral AI use, we risk stalling progress on developing effective, sector-wide strategies.

    This means institutions need to start a different kind of AI conversation – one grounded in ethics, wellbeing, and emotional care. It will require drawing on different expertise: not just academics and technologists, but also counsellors, student services staff, pastoral advisers, and mental health professionals. These are the people best placed to understand how AI is reshaping the emotional lives of our students.

    Any serious AI strategy must recognise that students are turning to these tools not just for essays, but for comfort and belonging too, and we must offer something better in return.

    If some of our students find it easier to confide in chatbots than in people, we need to confront what that says about the accessibility and design of our existing support systems, and how we might improve and resource them. Building a pastoral AI strategy is less about finding a perfect solution, but more about treating pastoral AI seriously, as a mirror which reflects back at us student loneliness, vulnerabilities, and institutional support gaps. These reflections should push us to re-centre these experiences, to reimagine our pastoral support provision, into an image that’s genuinely and unapologetically human.

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  • Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion)

    Academic Staff Need Academic Freedom, Too (opinion)

    Late last spring, something disturbing happened in my classroom. For the first time in 15 years of teaching, I opened by telling my students I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to speak. The class was an introduction to the philosophy of education, and months earlier I’d scheduled this day for our opening discussion on critical pedagogy. But in light of charged campus climates and broader legal threats facing institutions nationwide, I realized that as an academic staff member who engages in teaching and research, I was particularly vulnerable.

    What followed was one of the more important classes I’ve taught, though not about the subject I’d planned. We spent the hour investigating our institution’s academic freedom policies, asking questions of whom those policies included and excluded. We discovered the troubling reality: Although I was expected to facilitate complex educational discussions, I lacked clear protections to do so safely.

    My situation reflects a growing crisis in higher education that has received little attention. While much has been written about the vulnerabilities of contingent faculty, there has been almost no discussion of the academic freedom needs of one of higher education’s most rapidly growing workforces: third-space professionals.

    The Rise of the Third Space

    Over the past two decades, universities have dramatically expanded what researcher Celia Whitchurch terms “third-space” professionals: staff who blend academic and administrative functions but operate in the ambiguous territory between traditional faculty and staff roles.

    These roles aren’t new or unprecedented. The American Association of University Professors has long recognized that librarians, despite often holding staff status, require academic freedom protections given their integral role in teaching and research. What’s new is the scale and diversity of academic work now performed by nonfaculty academic professionals.

    This growth represents the contemporary evolution of a workforce shift that began in the 1970s, when academic support roles developed in response to diverse students entering colleges through open admissions policies. The 1990s brought expansion into new fields like faculty development and community-based learning, as colleges recognized these roles could enhance teaching practices institutionwide. Most recently, colleges have seen explosive growth in data-driven student success and enrollment management roles.

    What unites these professionals is their expertise in designing and delivering on the academic mission of the university, with special emphasis on student success. They lead pedagogical and curricular initiatives, make decisions about learning interventions, analyze data that reveals uncomfortable truths about institutional performance, and advocate for evidence-based policy revisions. They also regularly teach college courses, write and receive major grants, and publish in peer-reviewed journals. In essence, they do academic work, but without academic protections.

    Why Academic Freedom Matters for Third-Space Work

    The problem is easy to name but difficult to address. Institutions have radically restructured how academic work gets done based on the shifting needs of students and priorities of institutions, without a reciprocal restructuring of how academic work gets supported or protected. Third-space professionals need academic freedom protections for four key reasons.

    1. Educational decision-making: These professionals make pedagogical and curricular choices about student learning interventions, program design and educational strategies. Without academic freedom, they face pressure to implement approaches based on administrative convenience, pressure from faculty or donor preferences, rather than evidence-based best practices. What happens, for instance, when a faculty member feels the writing center’s approach to writing pedagogy conflicts with their own vision for writing in their classroom?
    2. Data interpretation and reporting: Student success professionals analyze retention, graduation and achievement data that may reveal uncomfortable truths about institutional performance or equity gaps. They need protection when their findings challenge institutional narratives or suggest costly reforms. What happens when an institutional researcher’s analysis shows that a flagship retention program isn’t working, but the administration has just featured it in a major donor presentation?
    3. Policy advocacy: Their direct work with students gives them insights into institutional policies and processes that harm student success. They should be able to advocate for necessary changes without fear of retaliation, even when those changes conflict with administrative priorities or departmental preferences. What happens when an academic adviser discovers that the prerequisite structure in a major is creating unnecessary barriers for students, but changing it would require difficult conversations with powerful department heads?
    1. Research and assessment: Many third-space professionals conduct and publish research on student success interventions, learning outcomes and institutional effectiveness. This scholarship requires the same protections as traditional academic research. What happens when assessment reveals the ineffectiveness of first-year seminar teaching, but presenting findings could damage relationships with faculty colleagues?

    The Problem of Selective Recognition

    Universities have already recognized that faculty work has diversified and requires differentiated policy structures. Many institutions now distinguish between research professors (focused on scholarship and grant acquisition), teaching professors (emphasizing teaching practice) and professors of practice (bringing professional expertise into academic settings). Each category receives tailored policies for promotion, performance evaluation and professional development that align with their distinct contributions.

    Yet on the staff side, institutions continue to operate as if all nonfaculty work is identical. A writing center director publishing on linguistic justice, an assistant dean of students developing crisis-intervention protocols for student mental health emergencies and a facilities director managing building maintenance are all governed by the same generic “staff” policies. This isn’t just administratively awkward: It’s a fundamental misalignment between how work actually happens and how institutions recognize and protect that work.

    Applying Consistent Logic

    The way forward isn’t revolutionary, but simply the application of the same logic that most universities already use for faculty. Rather than the outdated single “staff” category, colleges and universities need at least three distinct categories that reflect how staff work actually happens.

    1. Academic staff: Professionals engaged in teaching, research, curriculum design and educational assessment, including learning center directors, faculty developers, institutional researchers, professional academic advisers and academic program directors. These roles require academic freedom protections, scholarly review processes and governance representation.
    2. Student life staff: Professionals focused on co-curricular support, belonging and student life, including residence life coordinators, activities directors and counseling staff. These roles need specialized professional development and advancement pathways that recognize and support their expertise in student development.
    3. Operational staff: Professionals handling business functions, facilities and administrative operations. These roles can continue with traditional staff policies and support structures.

    This framework enables differentiated policy environments and support structures across multiple areas. Critically, academic freedom policies can be tailored to protect inquiry for staff who engage in this kind of work, while recognizing that other staff have different professional needs.

    The expansion of third-space/academic staff roles represents higher education’s recognition that effective student success requires diverse forms of expertise working collaboratively. But without policy frameworks that acknowledge and protect this academic work, institutions risk undermining the very innovations they’ve created. When the professionals responsible for student success cannot engage in free inquiry, challenge ineffective practices or advocate for evidence-based approaches, everyone loses—especially students.

    Aaron Stoller is associate vice president for student success and a lecturer in education at Colorado College.

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