Many people are losing hope because of the anti-DEI policies that state legislators and governors have enacted over the past four years, as well as the Trump administration’s brutal attacks via executive orders and the U.S. Department of Education’s now-infamous Valentine’s Day Dear Colleague letter. Hopelessness also has ensued following the swift renaming and discontinuation of offices, centers and institutes, programs and professional positions on campuses. It all happened so fast—in some contexts, over four years; everywhere else, in a matter of months. A significant experience I had three decades ago gives me hope in the possibility of eventual recovery from these politicized storms that have produced such extraordinary damage to DEI initiatives in higher education.
I was born and spent the first 22 years of my life in South Georgia, a place that frequently experiences violent hurricanes and tornadoes. I have seen entire communities wiped out within minutes. In July 1994, just six weeks before the start of my freshman year in college, Tropical Storm Alberto brought torrential rains to Albany, Ga. The National Weather Service reports that more than 30 people died, nearly 50,000 residents were forced to evacuate their homes and over 18,000 structures were completely lost. Many of those buildings were at Albany State, a historically Black university located along the Flint River, which flooded during the storm. Nineteen of its 34 buildings were destroyed beyond repair and ultimately demolished.
Somehow, our fall quarter miraculously started on time. Instead of residence halls, most students in my first-year class moved into mobile homes on campus; dump trucks were scooping massive quantities of mud and recovery crews were still assembling modular units where we would sleep on the day I arrived. There was so much mud. The mess was widespread—everywhere, in fact.
For years, many classrooms and offices were located in trailers. Despite the chaos and abundance of annoying mud everywhere at Albany State, there was hope. As my family and I drove into campus for move-in day, I remember seeing a huge banner on one of the few surviving buildings that simply read, “Unsinkable.” That one word became an inspirational chant and declaration that still pervades the institution, now more than 30 years later.
The flood took so much from my beloved alma mater, but recovery efforts, which required tremendous reliance on the federal government, resulted in a more modernized campus with attractive new facilities that are atypical for most HBCUs due to state and federal funding inequities. Because of what I witnessed firsthand during my four undergraduate years, as well as in the aftermath of numerous other calamitous weather crises that occurred throughout my youth, I know that communities can rebuild homes and structures that are more solid, attractive and high-tech than what previously existed. Even still, a sense of community, family heirlooms and, in some instances, the lives of people and pets are lost. No amount of federal aid can restore those things.
While the context and circumstances are different, living through this disastrous moment in American higher education because of, but not limited to, the politicized teardown of DEI is familiar to me. Put differently, I have lived through and witnessed recovery from many tragic storms.
That does not make it any less distressing. But my four-year undergraduate experience taught me how to envision possibilities beyond the daily inescapability of mud, debris and devastation. When I arrived at Albany State as an 18-year-old freshman, rebuilding had not yet started. The institution instead was working as hard as it could with the resources it had at the time to educate, house and serve us. That is where many contemporary college and university campuses are at this very moment as it pertains to DEI.
Understandably, many students and employees who are most affected by the abandonment of institutional commitments to DEI only have the capacity to survive this catastrophic moment; they are not yet able to begin recovery work. The unavailability of federal, state and institutional resources makes it even less possible for most people to think about the next iteration of DEI efforts on campuses.
Notwithstanding, hope for something better—even if we do not know when that something better will become available—could be the one and only thing that sustains those of us who are truly committed to DEI. To be sure, I do not believe that hope alone will be enough—coalitions, elections, stock taking and documentation of harm, fundraising, activism, institutional and governmental accountability, and sophisticated strategizing are also required.
Right now, there is so much mud. The mess is widespread—everywhere, in fact. Like Albany State, the beautiful HBCU that still stands strong more than 30 years after its neighboring Flint River flooded, DEI in higher education is unsinkable. I have no choice but to believe this, and I will continue doing all I can to achieve this outcome for colleges, universities and our democracy.
Shaun Harper is University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership.
First-year composition courses, which are required of incoming students at many colleges and universities, lack cachet. No student gets excited about a comp class, and the faculty who teach these classes usually occupy the low rungs on the academic ladder. And right now, as crisis after crisis batters the country, and the world, first-year composition may seem even less important than usual. But in my 30 years of college teaching, it’s first-year comp classes that give me hope, because they offer the possibility of change.
These small, discussion-based classes give students much-needed practice in how to disagree without disrespect, and—if these classes were embedded more firmly into university curricula—they could radically reshape not only how students learn but how they participate in public life.
My students often come into their comp class with a chip on their shoulder: Why should they have to “learn to write”? They got themselves into college, after all, and if they get stuck on a writing assignment, there’s always ChatGPT. First-year writing is a waste of time, they think; they’re in college to take “real” classes, courses that matter.
I harbor a secret affection for these reluctant students, because I know that their resistance will melt when they discover the immensely practical importance of finding the right words for their ideas—and the accompanying sense of power that comes with being able to express themselves so that others understand them. Universities tell students that comp classes aren’t “content courses,” because writing courses aren’t discipline-specific. But then again, neither is the world we live in: Most of us live, work and think in multiple, overlapping contexts.
For many students, the composition class is the first (and for some, the only) place in college where they experience a seminar-style class that emphasizes process as much as (or more than) product. The paradigm of a composition course involves a reset: It’s not about “the right answer”; it’s about prioritizing curiosity over certainty and about students discovering not only that they have a voice, but that they can use this voice to explore their world. In the 21st-century university, in which faculty are asked for their “course deliverables,” as if learning were an assembly-line widget, comp classes exemplify an alternative to the sludgy tide of university corporatization.
Composition classes encourage questions, welcome mistakes and revisions, and value messiness and curiosity. During peer workshops, which are an integral part of these courses, I remind students that grades aren’t pie: Everyone can, conceivably, get an A in the course, so their workshop task is helping one another create more effective writing, not to tear each other’s drafts to shreds. Their success, in other words, does not depend on someone else’s failure.
There are other disciplines where students work iteratively and collaboratively—computer science, for example. But in composition workshops, students learn to ask the kinds of questions that promote reflection and refinement. They’re quick to pick up on one another’s sweeping generalizations—“throughout history, men and women have always disagreed”—and explain why those sorts of generalizations aren’t effective.
As they talk, they see how their own experiences might be radically different from those of the people reading their work, and they begin to understand how their experiences, consciously or not, have shaped how they see the world. In classroom conversations and workshops, they learn to disagree without rancor and to understand that how they chose to explain (or not explain) an idea has consequences for how they are understood. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, writes that college campuses “are places where dissenting views deserve an elevated degree of respectful and scholarly engagement.” That’s a tall order for U.S. colleges these days, it seems, but it’s one of the underlying principles of composition classrooms.
“How could I say this better?” is a question I hear writers ask, to which their readers reply, “What do you really want to say, and why?” Students ask one another to explain the evidence for their claims, to examine their assumptions and to think about alternative ways of presenting their ideas. Composition courses help people become more effective writers because they help people become better listeners: Students learn to disagree without dismissiveness or disrespect. And as they help one another, they see ways to improve their own work; it’s a feedback loop that helps them find critical distance, which is essential for revision. Quite literally, students have to re-see their ideas and consider the impact of those ideas on their audience.
I remember when a male student from Shanghai read an essay written by a female student from the Persian Gulf about her struggles to be a dutiful daughter. “She totally read my mind,” the Shanghai student proclaimed. “Being a good son, trying to keep my parents happy—it’s exhausting!” His comment prompted a class discussion about the generational struggles they all shared, albeit across wildly divergent cultural experiences. Their differences prompted questions that led to connections; difference became an opportunity for exploration rather than a threat. Students were excited to write the essays that emerged from this conversation; they were invested in examining their own experiences in order to open those experiences to others.
That’s what reading and writing can give us: moments of connection with other people’s lives, which then help us see ourselves in a new light. Connection and distance, empathy and self-reflection: These are the qualitative moves that students practice in composition class. These are the deliverables.
These deliverables, however, don’t translate into status for composition teachers, who are typically not tenure-track or tenured; they are often called lecturers rather than professors, despite having a Ph.D. Most of us are what’s known as contingent faculty because we work on renewable contracts (sometimes semester to semester, sometimes in longer increments).
To be a composition teacher, then, means working in the trenches of the university rather than its ivory towers. I’ve been teaching some version of first-year writing for more than 30 years, and while I might hope otherwise, I know that only one or two semesters of writing instruction isn’t enough to create lasting change, even though the most resistant students admit to feeling like more confident and competent writers by the end of the course.
If universities had the courage to put composition at the center of their missions, however, they could create real change: What if students had expository writing classes every year for four years, regardless of their majors? Four years of slow, reflective, process-based writing about the world outside their specific subjects, with an emphasis on exploration and curiosity, rather than “the right answer”? What if the ability to reflect and reconsider, the twinned abilities at the heart of critical thinking, were the deliverables that mattered?
Imagine those students bringing that training into the public sphere. People who are eager to ask questions and interrogate assumptions (including their own), people who think in terms of process rather than product: These are the basic tenets of almost any composition class and yet, increasingly, these attitudes seem almost radical. People trained in this way could re-shape public discourse so that it becomes conversation rather than a series of point-scoring contests.
First-year comp is a content course. We just need to see that content as valuable.
Deborah Lindsay Williams is a clinical professor in liberal studies at New York University. She is author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940 (Oxford, 2024).
CLEVELAND — In a public school cafeteria here, 6- and 7-year olds were taking turns sketching their ideas for a building made of toothpicks and gummy bears. Their task: to design a structure strong enough to support a single subject notebook.
It was a challenge meant to test their abilities to plan ahead, work as a team and overcome setbacks. But first, they had to resist the urge to eat the building materials.
Zayden Barnes, a first grader at Clara E. Westropp School of the Arts, picked up a blue gummy bear and sniffed it. “That smells good,” he said, licking his lips.
Mia Navarro, another first grader, held a green gummy bear to her nose and inhaled deeply. “I can’t stop smelling them!” she exclaimed. “I just want to eat it, but I can’t!”
The lesson in engineering and self-control was part of an after-school program run by the nonprofit Horizon Education Centers. It’s one of a dwindling number of after-school options in a city with one of the highest child poverty rates of any large urban area in the country.
Last year, Horizon and other nonprofit after-school providers reached more than 7,000 students in Cleveland public schools, buoyed by $17 million in pandemic recovery aid. But when the money ran out at the end of that school year, nonprofits here had to drop sites, shed staff and shrink enrollment. Horizon, which was in five public schools last year, is now in just one.
Similar setbacks can be seen across the country, as after-school programs struggle to replace billions in federal relief money. While a few states are helping to fill the gap, Ohio isn’t among them. And many providers fear more cuts are coming, as the Trump administration continues its campaign to slash government spending and end “equity-related” grants and contracts.
The after-school sector plays a critical role in the nation’s economy, providing close to 8 million students, or nearly 14 percent of all school-aged children, with a safe place to go while their parents work. It offers homework help, enriching activities, healthy snacks and physical exercise — often for a fee, but sometimes for free.
Done well, after-school programs can strengthen students’ social and emotional skills, increase their engagement with and attendance in school, and reduce their risk of substance abuse or criminal activity. In some cases, they can help improve grades and test scores, too.
Yet the sector, which has existed for more than 100 years, has long been hobbled by inadequate funding, staffing shortages and uneven quality. There are long waitlists for many programs, and low-income families often struggle to find affordable options.
In a recent survey by the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance, more than 80 percent of program leaders said they were concerned about their program’s future, and more than 40 percent said they worried they’d have to close permanently.
“The state of afterschool in America feels very grim,” said Alison Black, executive director of the Cleveland affiliate of America Scores, a nonprofit that teaches soccer and poetry to students in 13 cities across North America.
Students build a gummy bear structure in an after-school program run by Horizon Education Centers, in Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
After-school programs emerged in the second half of the 19th century, in philanthropic settlement houses that provided English courses and health care to the children of immigrants, according to a Rand Corporation report. They multiplied after Congress passed child labor laws in the 1930s, and again during World War II, when women entered the workforce in large numbers.
In those early days, the programs functioned mostly as child care, offering a solution to the problem of the “latchkey kid.” But they began to take on a broader role in the 1960s, when the programs started to be seen as a way to both reduce youth crime and provide kids with positive role models, according to Rand.
In the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers and funders began demanding that after-school programs play a part in closing the academic gaps between wealthier and poorer kids. High-poverty schools began setting aside some of their Title I funds to provide after-school programs.
But it wasn’t until 1998 that the federal government offered targeted support to after-school programs, in the form of competitive grants awarded by the states through the newly created 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program. The first year, Congress appropriated $40 million for the program; by 2002, that number had swelled to $1 billion.
Today, the after-school sector is made up of a mix of programs providing academic support, enrichment (sports, theater and the like) or some combination. Their goals and funding streams vary, from public dollars to philanthropic and corporate gifts. Many survive by stitching together multiple sources of funding.
The 21st Century program remains the only dedicated federal funding stream for after-school and summer learning, providing $1.3 billion in support to 10,000 centers serving close to a fifth of students in 2023.
After-school programs are popular among parents, and demand for slots far exceeds the supply. For every child in an after-school program, there are three more who would participate if an affordable, accessible option was available to their families, according to surveys by the Afterschool Alliance.
Gina Warner, CEO of the National Afterschool Association, says afterschool is a space where kids can try new things and take risks they wouldn’t take at school, where the stakes are higher. “Afterschool is still a place where kids can fail” without consequence, she said.
The programs also connect students with positive adult role models who aren’t their teachers or caregivers, said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance. “Our biggest strength, when it gets down to it, is relationships,” Grant said.
But sustaining those connections can be difficult in a sector with low pay and limited opportunities for advancement. Turnover rates are high, and when staff don’t stick around, “You’re missing one of the best benefits of afterschool,” said Warner.
Students practice a dance routine at the Downtown Boxing Gym, in Detroit. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
For a sector accustomed to scraping by, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was like a winning lottery ticket.
Over three years, after-school programs received roughly $10 billion in ARPA aid — money they used to add staff, improve pay and benefits and expand enrollment, according to the Afterschool Alliance. It estimates that programs were able to serve 5 million more kids as a result.
But the money has mostly been spent, and late last month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon told districts that their time to use any remaining funds was over. In Cleveland, which spent almost $28 million on out-of-school time programs between fiscal 2022 and 2024, Horizon and other nonprofits formed a coalition to try to convince the district to continue at least a portion of the aid. They held rallies, secured media coverage and brought parents to testify before the school board. But the district wouldn’t budge, said David Smith, Horizon’s executive director.
“There’s no opportunity to go back to the scale we were at during the pandemic, and we still have the same problems,” said Smith. “Kids are getting in trouble after school, and they still need the extra academic help.”
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District made significant gains under its last CEO, Eric Gordon, whose Cleveland Plan was credited with improved student outcomes, including a 25 percentage point increase in the high school graduation rate. But the pandemic erased some of those gains and Cleveland, like many districts, is still recovering.
The district’s new CEO, Warren Morgan, has defended his decision not to fund the nonprofit providers, noting that the district offers after-school sports and an arts program. But those extracurriculars vary by day and by school, and after-school advocates say many schools have been left without the consistent, comprehensive care working parents depend on.
“Our city is focused on workforce development without thinking about who cutting this care hurts,” said Black, of America Scores Cleveland.
Without continued support from the district, Black’s organization has had to dip into its rainy-day fund and drop fall soccer for middle schoolers. Serving elementary students feels more essential, she explained, since younger kids can’t stay home alone.
Other nonprofits have been harder hit. The Greater Cleveland Neighborhood Centers Association, or NCA, has closed half of its locations in the district, leaving programs in seven schools. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Northeast Ohio, which lost $3 million in pandemic relief dollars and other federal support this academic year, has shuttered 17 sites.
Dorothy Moulthrop, chief executive officer of Open Doors Academy, another nonprofit, thinks the losses might have been less severe if the after-school coalition had been able to show strong results for the federal money. Though individual programs handed over reams of data to the district, Moulthrop wasn’t able to get its leaders to share the data in a form that would allow providers to study their collective impact.
“We needed to be able to demonstrate our return on investment and we were not able to,” she said.
Students in a poetry class run by America Scores Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Questions about whether after-school programs are a good investment of public dollars have dogged the sector since the early 2000s, when Mathematica Policy Research began publishing the results of an evaluation that found the 21st Century program had little impact on student outcomes.
The study, which is often cited by politicians seeking to gut after-school spending, was controversial at the time, and remains so. Defenders of afterschool argue the evaluation was methodologically flawed and point to other research that found that students who regularly attended high-quality programs saw significant gains. But one of the study’s two authors, Susanne James-Burdumy, said in an interview that it was the most rigorous of its time.
In the 20 years since the Mathematica reports were published, hundreds of dissertations and program evaluations have added to the evidence base for both sides of the debate. But large-scale, rigorous evaluations of after-school programs remain rare, and their findings are mixed, James-Burdumy and other researchers say.
Though some analyses have found after-school programs can boost reading and math achievement, promote positive social behaviors and reduce negative ones, other studies have shown little growth in those and other areas.
Some of that inconsistency likely stems from differences in the quality of programs, researchers and advocates say. When funding is tight, after-school programs tend to focus their dollars on services, rather than professional development or program evaluation.
“Quality often feels like an extra,” said Jessie Kerr-Vanderslice, a consultant at the American Institutes for Research who focuses on out-of-school time programs.
Advocates also note a misalignment between program goals and outcome measures: While after-school programs often prioritize relationships and social and emotional skill-building, their funders frequently focus on academic gains.
One variable that seems to matter in student outcomes is attendance: Studies have found that students who attend regularly reap greater benefits than those who show up sporadically.
Yet more than half of students who participated in programs paid for with 21st Century grants in 2022-23 attended for less than 90 hours, a program evaluation shows. That works out to just 30 days for a three-hour program.
At Clara E. Westropp Elementary in Cleveland, where Horizon Education Centers has been able to continue its after-school program with a 21st Century grant, 73 students are enrolled, but average daily attendance is less than half that.
Students descend the stairs during an after-school program run by America Scores Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
On the other side of Lake Erie, at Detroit’s Downtown Boxing Gym, students are required to attend at least three days a week. To keep them coming, the program offers a huge range of activities, from cooking to coding (but ironically, not boxing).
Inside the large building that houses the program, there’s a lab with a flight simulator and 3D printer, and a music studio paid for and built by one of Eminem’s former producers.
Outside, on a turf field where the program plans to build an addition that will enable it to double enrollment, a group of middle school majorettes was preparing for an upcoming dance performance.
Debra Beal, who became the caregiver to her niece’s two young sons when she was in her 50s, says the program saved her life — and theirs. It kept the boys, now 19 and 20, off the streets while she worked, provided them with exercise and tutoring, and even served them dinner. The staff became like family, supporting her when she struggled as a parent and offering to pay for counseling when one son lost his father and uncle from fentanyl overdoses on the same day.
“What they’re doing is life-changing,” said Beal, whose long denim coat had the word “Blessed” written in sequins on the back.
Financially, the Downtown Boxing Gym is on surer footing than its counterparts in Cleveland. The Michigan Legislature has provided $50 million in funding for after-school programs in each of the last two years, and the program recently received $3 million in funds from the state.
That doesn’t mean the program isn’t being pinched by the Trump administration’s cost-cutting campaign and purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said Jessica Hauser, its executive director. Corporations the program was counting on for seven-figure gifts for the addition and program expansion are reconsidering their pledges, and a promised federal earmark now seems unlikely.
Hauser is also worried about potential cuts to federal child nutrition programs and student aid, which the program depends on for meals and college student tutors.
Back in Cleveland, the coalition Smith formed to fight for after-school funding has expanded to include the city, the county and a local foundation, which hired a consultant to come up with the cost to deliver quality after-school programming. To longtime advocates like Smith and Allison Wallace, executive director of the NCA, it feels like the sector is having to prove itself, yet again.
“They’re revisiting conversations we had 15 years ago, around best practices and identifying quality,” Wallace said. “We keep going over the same things, and we’re not getting any traction.”
Things could get even tougher in the next couple years, as the district shifts the costs of providing security and custodial services for after-school programs onto the nonprofit providers. Wallace estimates that the change will cost providers tens of thousands per site.
And future federal funding is far from guaranteed. Though the 21st Century program enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, Trump sought to eliminate it in every budget proposal he issued in his first term and is expected to do so again.
For now, though, after-school programs are still providing kids in Cleveland with caring staff, a safe place to spend the hours after school, and engaging activities like gummy bear construction.
The teams had 10 minutes to build structures that could support a notebook. When the timer went off, the structure built by Zayden and Mia’s group resembled a two-story house with a caved-in roof. Zayden wasn’t feeling optimistic.
“I think it’s going to fall,” he said.
“Think positive,” said Kathy Thome, a program administrator who is helping the group.
Ian Welch, the program’s site coordinator for Clara E. Westropp, picked up a notebook and approached the table. He reminded the teams that failure is part of the scientific method. If their structures collapse, they can try again, he said.
“It’s going to squish down,” Mia predicted.
She was right. But the flattened structure still held the notebook aloft. The kids jumped up and down, and Zayden did a little boogie.
“We’re so happy — we did it!” he said.
Welch rewarded their effort with some fresh gummy bears, and the kids, proud and hopped up on sugar, waited for their parents to pick them up.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
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It started, as so many great conversations do, over coffee.
On a chilly January day as we swapped tales of small children and shared cultural touchstones, we found ourselves riffing on the Trolls movie (which it turns out we have both seen a painful number of times). In particular, we found ourselves in Borgentown: a drab, grey world of monotony and drudgery, where fleeting joy depends on eating the vibrant, music-loving Trolls.
There’s an uncomfortable resonance with the current temperature of higher education where we can see the joy and possibility at the heart of education being overshadowed by a grinding sense of the need for survival. The drip-feed of news of more institutions in financial trouble, the dissipation of expectation that the Westminster government would pursue bold action early in its term of office, the existential dread of global geopolitics.
The sense that the sector desperately needs a fresh vision and plan for the future, combined with unease about whether that vision will ever materialise and where it will materialise from. It’s hardly surprising that even relentless chirpy people like us can sometimes feel a bit…Borgeny.
Ode to joy
Mark is an educator and Debbie a policy wonk, but we share the conviction that education should be a joyful act. It is the engineering of possibility, the building of capability, the empowerment of individuals to deliver positive impact in the world. It is an act of creation (and creation by proxy), and any such act is joyous. Done well, policymaking can also be creative and empowering, in the ways it seeks to adjust the conditions for good and desirable outcomes to flourish.
But the mood in higher education often feels very different. It feels negative and ground down, paralysed, even fatalistic. Educators, long asked to do more with less, feel denied, their good ideas drowned out by demands for managerial efficiency. Meanwhile, leaders are navigating hostile, contradictory, resource-constrained times. The result is a collective energy that’s fraught and disempowered. This is dangerous, because fatalism is a trap.
Paolo Freire wrote of the ways that fatalism denies people the ability to imagine change. It leaves us believing that what is, is all that ever can be. Education is the opposite of fatalism – it equips us with the power to critically appraise the way things are and to imagine alternatives. Freire said that the primary goal of educators should be to punctuate fatalism with critical hope. And so there is a double tragedy if even educators are deprived of their potential to imagine and enable better futures. Similarly, policymakers at all levels need to take seriously their responsibility to convene, lead, and enable change, lest fatalism set in and undermine the social fabric.
When we talk to sector colleagues, we see a creeping fatalism that comes with dealing with a proliferation of things that are difficult, not in a stretching or challenging or inspiring way, but in a way that chips away at mental and emotional bandwidth. But we also see lots to get excited about – an underlying energy and continued appetite to engage in imaginative discussion, an empathy for the challenges individuals and teams are facing that is breaking down some of the traditional silos, and a curiosity and openness to finding new ways to solve old problems.
The higher education sector is going through some tough times. It may not look exactly the same as it does now a decade hence, but it retains an extraordinary capacity to shape its own future. And this is where we think there is scope for some “interdisciplinary” thinking to happen.
Coming to a website near you
As Wonkhe’s newest contributing editor, in the months ahead Mark will intentionally explore ideas that seem unachievable on the surface, not to frustrate, but to provoke and to encourage us to see what those ideas tell us about what is possible. We will poke at old orthodoxies – and unsettle some new ones before they sediment fully.
Are our narratives on how research environments benefit students really compelling (really?)? Is our defensiveness around grade inflation obscuring that classifications are just a really stupid way of signalling talent? And while we’re at that, can assessment be freed from the stranglehold of compliance? Is “belonging” already becoming a hollow buzzword? And what happens if we fully lean into AI rather than mitigating it? We’ll play with the notion of “co-creation” as only currently skimming at the surface of possibility – and explore pedagogy as a device to more authentically deliver civic aspirations.
In that spirit, we will also have one eye on policy, and the changes that would be needed to policy to help bring new ideas and thinking into being. Imagining different possibilities has to include tackling questions of what concepts like “quality” and “access” mean in the changing higher education landscape, and what they can or ought to mean in the future, what accountabilities and enabling relationships educators, professionals, and institutions should have and how/the extent to which these can be mediated through policy.
This is not an exercise in naive utopianism, nor is it an attempt to attack the sector. Rather it is an affirmation of the sector’s talent, creativity, and intellectual energy. We want to rally the dreamers, the thinkers, and the doers in education – those who are already innovating, those waiting for permission to dream, and those who believe another world is possible – to prise open the Overton window of what is politically acceptable, and push at the boundaries that various sector sacred cows make appear as if they are set in stone.
The new vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra (UC) Bill Shorten said universities will never make everybody happy, but they should do their best to try.
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