Tag: Jobs

Why Grad Students Can’t Afford to Ignore AI (opinion)
I recently found myself staring at my computer screen, overwhelmed by the sheer pace of AI developments flooding my inbox. Contending with the flow of new tools, updated models and breakthrough announcements felt like trying to drink from a fire hose. As someone who coaches graduate students navigating their academic and professional journeys, I realized I was experiencing the same anxiety many of my students express: How do we keep up with something that’s evolving faster than we can learn?

But here’s what I’ve come to understand through my own experimentation and reflection: The question isn’t whether we can keep up, but whether we can afford not to engage. As graduate students, you’re training to become the critical thinkers, researchers and leaders our world desperately needs. If you step back from advances in AI, you’re not just missing professional opportunities; you’re abdicating your responsibility to help shape how these powerful tools impact society.

The Stakes Are Higher Than You Think

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence isn’t just a tech trend but a fundamental shift that will reshape every field, from humanities research to scientific discovery. As graduate students, you have a unique opportunity and responsibility. You’re positioned at the intersection of deep subject matter expertise and flexible thinking. You can approach AI tools with both the technical sophistication to use them effectively and the critical perspective to identify their limitations and potential harms.

When I reflect on my own journey with AI tools, I’m reminded of my early days learning to navigate complex organizational systems. Just as I had to develop strategic thinking skills to thrive in bureaucratic environments, we now need to develop AI literacy to thrive in an AI-augmented world. The difference is the timeline: We don’t have years to adapt gradually. We have months, maybe weeks, before these tools become so embedded in professional workflows that not knowing how to use them thoughtfully becomes a significant disadvantage.

My Personal AI Tool Kit: Tools Worth Exploring

Rather than feeling paralyzed by the abundance of options, I’ve taken a systematic approach to exploring AI tools. I chose the tools in my current tool kit not because they’re perfect, but because they represent different ways AI can enhance rather than replace human thinking.
- Large Language Models: Beyond ChatGPT
Yes, ChatGPT was the breakthrough that captured everyone’s attention, but limiting yourself to one LLM is like using only one search engine. I regularly experiment with Claude for its nuanced reasoning capabilities, Gemini for its integration with Google’s ecosystem and DeepSeek for being an open-source model. Each has distinct strengths, and understanding these differences helps me choose the right tool for specific tasks.

The key insight I’ve gained is that these aren’t just fancy search engines or writing assistants. They’re thinking partners that can help you explore ideas, challenge assumptions and approach problems from multiple angles, if you know how to prompt them effectively.
- Executive Function Support: Goblin Tools
One discovery that surprised me was Goblin Tools, an AI-powered suite of tools designed to support executive function. As someone who juggles multiple projects and deadlines and is navigating an invisible disability, I’ve found the task breakdown and time estimation features invaluable. For graduate students managing research, coursework and teaching responsibilities, tools like this can provide scaffolding for the cognitive load that often overwhelms even the most organized among us.
- Research Acceleration: Elicit and Consensus
Perhaps the most transformative tools in my workflow are Elicit and Consensus. These platforms don’t just help you find research papers, but also help you understand research landscapes, identify gaps in literature and synthesize findings across multiple studies.

What excites me most about these tools is how they augment rather than replace critical thinking. They can surface connections you might miss and highlight contradictions in the literature, but you still need the domain expertise to evaluate the quality of sources and the analytical skills to synthesize findings meaningfully.
- Real-Time Research: Perplexity
Another tool that has become indispensable in my research workflow is Perplexity. What sets Perplexity apart is its ability to provide real-time, cited responses by searching the internet and academic sources simultaneously. I’ve found this particularly valuable for staying current with rapidly evolving research areas and for fact-checking information. When I’m exploring a new topic or need to verify recent developments in a field, Perplexity serves as an intelligent research assistant that not only finds relevant information but also helps me understand how different sources relate to each other. The key is using it as a starting point for deeper investigation, not as the final word on any topic.
- Visual Communication: Beautiful.ai, Gamma and Napkin
Presentation and visual communication tools represent another frontier where AI is making significant impact. Beautiful.ai and Gamma can transform rough ideas into polished presentations, while Napkin excels at creating diagrams and visual representations of complex concepts.

I’ve found these tools particularly valuable not just for final presentations, but for thinking through ideas visually during the research process. Sometimes seeing your argument laid out in a diagram reveals logical gaps that weren’t apparent in text form.
- Staying Informed: The Pivot 5 Newsletter
With so much happening so quickly, staying informed without becoming overwhelmed is crucial. I subscribe to the Pivot 5 newsletter, which provides curated insights into AI developments without the breathless hype that characterizes much AI coverage. Finding reliable, thoughtful sources for AI news is as important as learning to use the tools themselves.

Beyond the Chat Bots: Developing Critical AI Literacy

Here’s where I want to challenge you to think more deeply. Most discussions about AI in academia focus on policies about chat bot use in assignments—important, but insufficient. The real opportunity lies in developing what I call critical AI literacy: understanding not just how to use these tools, but when to use them, how to evaluate their outputs and how to maintain your own analytical capabilities.

This means approaching AI tools with the same rigor you’d apply to any research methodology. What are the assumptions built into these systems? What biases might they perpetuate? How do you verify AI-generated insights? These aren’t just philosophical questions; they’re practical skills that will differentiate thoughtful AI users from passive consumers.

A Strategic Approach to AI Engagement

Drawing from the strategic thinking framework I’ve advocated for in the past, here’s how I suggest you approach AI engagement:
- Start with purpose: Before adopting any AI tool, clearly identify what problem you’re trying to solve. Are you looking to accelerate research, improve writing, manage complex projects or enhance presentations? Different tools serve different purposes.
- Experiment systematically: Don’t try to learn everything at once. Choose one or two tools that align with your immediate needs and spend time understanding their capabilities and limitations before moving on to others.
- Maintain critical distance: Use these tools as thinking partners, not thinking replacements. Always maintain the ability to evaluate and verify AI outputs against your own expertise and judgment.
- Share and learn: Engage with peers about your experiences. What works? What doesn’t? What ethical considerations have you encountered? This collective learning is crucial for developing best practices.
The Cost of Standing Still

I want to be clear about what’s at stake. This isn’t about keeping up with the latest tech trends or optimizing productivity, even though those are benefits. It’s about ensuring that the most important conversations about AI’s role in society include the voices of critically trained, ethically minded scholars.

If graduate students, future professors, researchers, policymakers and industry leaders retreat from AI engagement, we leave these powerful tools to be shaped entirely by technologists and venture capitalists. The nuanced understanding of human behavior, ethical frameworks and social systems that you’re developing in your graduate programs is exactly what’s needed to guide AI development responsibly.

The pace of change isn’t slowing down. In fact, it’s accelerating. But that’s precisely why your engagement matters more, not less. The world needs people who can think critically about these tools, who understand both their potential and their perils, and who can help ensure they’re developed and deployed in ways that benefit rather than harm society.

Moving Forward With Intention

As you consider how to engage with AI tools, remember that this isn’t about becoming a tech expert overnight. It’s about maintaining the curiosity and critical thinking that brought you to graduate school in the first place. Start small, experiment thoughtfully and always keep your analytical mind engaged.

The future we’re building with AI won’t be determined by the tools themselves, but by the people who choose to engage with them thoughtfully and critically. As graduate students, you have the opportunity—and, I’d argue, the responsibility—to be part of that conversation.

The question isn’t whether AI will transform your field. It’s whether you’ll help shape that transformation or let it happen to you. The choice, as always, is yours to make.

Dinuka Gunaratne (he/him) has worked across several postsecondary institutions in Canada and the U.S. and is a member of several organizational boards, including Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning Canada, CERIC—Advancing Career Development in Canada, and the leadership team of the Administrators in Graduate and Professional Student Services knowledge community with NASPA: Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education.
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July 28, 2025
Ky. Prof. Calling for War Against Israel Pulled From Teaching

Since Oct. 7, 2023, scholars and members of the broader public have debated whether Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza actually constitutes a genocide of Palestinians. Fights have erupted over scholarly association resolutions, course descriptions and assignments calling it such.

Ramsi Woodcock, a University of Kentucky law professor, says it’s a genocide. On his website, antizionist.net, he says that the ongoing genocide—combined with his expectation that Israel would violate any future ceasefire and continue killing—creates a “moral duty” for the world’s nations.

That duty, he writes in the “Petition for Military Action Against Israel,” is to wage war on Israel until it “has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” He asks fellow law scholars to sign the petition, adding that Israel is a colony and war is needed to decolonize.

This month—just after Woodcock says he was promoted to full professor—the university removed him from teaching. In a July 18 message to campus that doesn’t specifically name Woodcock, UK president Eli Capilouto wrote that legal counsel was investigating whether an employee’s “conduct may violate federal and state guidance as well as university policies.”

“We have been made aware of allegations of disturbing conduct, including an online petition calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin,” Capilouto wrote. Woodcock told Inside Higher Ed that characterization of his petition is “obviously defamatory, creates a hostile environment for me and makes me potentially physically unsafe.” He said he’s considering suing Capilouto and the university for defamation.

Capilouto further wrote that the petition, which the unnamed university employee seemed to be “broadly” circulating online, “can be interpreted as antisemitic in accordance with state and federal guidance.” Woodcock responded that “what Palestinians resist, and what those who advocate for them resist, is colonization, apartheid and a currently unfolding genocide—they are not opposed to any particular religion or any particular people.”

But Shlomo Litvin, chairman of the Kentucky Jewish Council and rabbi for the Chabad at UK Jewish Student Center, told Inside Higher Ed that “calling for the establishment of a state that is free of Jews in a land that currently has seven million Jews is calling for the death of seven million Jews,” including “families and relatives of [Woodcock’s] students.”

“What he’s calling for is a second Holocaust,” Litvin said, adding that “this idea that there is a possibility of the Jews coming to some imaginary country and being safe there is a fantasy that not even he believes.”

Woodcock countered, “Rabbi Litvin is trying to distract us from an actual second Holocaust that Israel is committing right now in Gaza and which only immediate military intervention will stop.”

Woodcock has become another example of pro-Palestine faculty across the country being investigated for their writing or speech about the conflict while they aren’t teaching. During the Biden era, investigations at other universities led to discipline and terminations. The current Trump administration has stripped universities of federal funding and punished them in other ways for allegedly failing to address campus antisemitism. And Woodcock’s case continues the debate about when denunciations of Israel or Zionism are or aren’t antisemitic.

But why UK began investigating Woodcock now remains unclear.

‘Not Academic Discourse’

In a July 18 email obtained by Inside Higher Ed, UK’s general counsel, William E. Thro, wrote to Woodcock that “recently, the university became aware of your writings on certain websites, your conduct at academic conferences, and your postings on American Association of Law Schools [sic] list serves [sic], and other actions.”

“These activities may create a hostile environment for Jewish members of the university community or otherwise constitute harassment as defined by the Supreme Court,” Thro wrote. “The university has concerns that your actions may violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the equivalent state laws, and various university policies.”

Title VI prohibits discrimination based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.

But the letter didn’t provide further details, such as what conference conduct or writings the university was concerned about, or how university officials became aware of this expression. A UK spokesperson said, “At this time, we are not going to comment beyond [Capilouto’s] statement, as there is an active investigation.”

Woodcock said he made a statement about “Israel’s genocide of Palestinians” at a conference over a year ago. He later shared a link to his antizionist.net site on Association of American Law Schools online discussion forums, triggering “really lively debate about whether Israel has a right to exist.”

“Nobody wants to talk about that question, and as soon as you bring it up, you see how hungry people are to debate it,” Woodcock said.

He says he created the antizionist.net website late last year but didn’t share it broadly until the start of this month. It’s a site for what he dubs the Antizionist legal studies movement.

“Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza,” Woodcock wrote on the site in December. “No genocide in the 20th century ended without armed intervention. For more than a year now, the international community has been in denial about the implication of these two facts.”

He listed various failed international efforts to stop the genocide, ending with “Even the most outspoken international lawyers dare not speak the name of the only thing that history suggests might actually stop Israel. That is, of course, war—by the international community against Israel.”

Woodcock says he wants Israel defeated and replaced with a Palestinian state, and he doesn’t insist the vast majority of Jews be automatically allowed to remain. He says Palestinians should get to decide. His definition of “antizionist legal scholars” includes that they oppose “any right of self-determination for Jewish people as such in Palestine.” He does say that “the tiny minority of Jewish people whose ancestors lived in Palestine immediately prior to the arrival of the first Zionist colonizers in Palestine in 1882 … share in the right of Palestinians to self determination.”

“Palestinian people alone should decide how Palestine should be governed after independence, including the legal status of the colonizer population,” he says.

The Kentucky Jewish Council and State Sen. Lindsey Tichenor, a co-chair of the state General Assembly’s Kentucky-Israel Caucus, praised the decision to remove Woodcock from the classroom. In a statement, Tichenor wrote that the “reports coming out of our taxpayer-funded flagship university are incredibly disturbing. A law professor calling for the destruction of Israel and against the right for the Jewish people to have self-determination is not a policy disagreement, but a call to violence.”

“That is not academic discourse. It’s antisemitism and racism and abuse of his power, plain and simple,” Tichenor wrote. She thanked Capilouto “for his strong and unequivocal condemnation of this hateful message” and for reinforcing “the importance of moral clarity and swift institutional accountability.”

But Capilouto’s message also hinted at the academic freedom concerns at play. He wrote that the situation “compels us to address questions other campuses are grappling with as well—chiefly, where and when does conduct and the freedom to express views in a community compromise the safety and well-being of people in that community?”

In a statement to Inside Higher Ed, Connor Murnane, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s campus advocacy chief of staff, said, “FIRE is actively investigating this case, and we’re concerned that Professor Woodcock may have been punished for protected activities.”

Jennifer Cramer, president of UK’s American Association of University Professors chapter, said that “assuming he did not pose a threat in any meaningful way to our campus, I think that the treatment of this case seems outside of the bounds of the norm.” She said that “whether we agree with what he says or not shouldn’t matter, because that’s the point of academic freedom.”

Woodcock hasn’t stopped calling for war on Israel, posting on X, “Zionists are frustrated that their intimidation campaign hasn’t shut me up.”

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July 28, 2025
Lawsuit Over NIH Grant Funding Heads to Supreme Court

The NIH has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding that it says is used to conduct illegal DEI and gender identity-related research.

Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Adam Bartosik and Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock/Getty Images

The Trump administration has taken its fight over grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Supreme Court, requesting permission Thursday to finalize millions of dollars in award cuts, CBS News reported.

President Trump began slashing research funding shortly after he took office in January, targeting projects that allegedly defied his executive orders against issues such as gender identity and DEI. By early April, 16 states and multiple academic associations and advocacy groups had sued, arguing the funding cuts were an unjustified executive overreach and bypassed statutory procedures.

Since then, a federal district court ordered a preliminary injunction requiring all grants to be reinstated, and a court of appeals denied the Trump administration’s request to halt the decision. Now, executive branch legal officials are taking the case to the highest court.

In an emergency appeal, Solicitor General John Sauer wrote that the NIH is attempting to “stop errant district courts from continuing to disregard” presidential orders.

The solicitor also pointed to an April ruling from the Supreme Court allowing the Department of Education to terminate some of its own grants for similar reasons. In that case, the justices said the Trump administration would likely be able to prove that the lower court lacked jurisdiction to mandate the payment of a federal award.

The court system does not allow a “lower-court free-for-all where individual district judges feel free to elevate their own policy judgments over those of the Executive Branch, and their own legal judgments over those of this Court,” Sauer wrote.

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July 25, 2025
Students See Internships as Must-Haves
A majority of students say they interned to gain skills for career advancement in their desired field or role.

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Employers, college leaders and policymakers have shown growing interest in skills-based hiring for college graduates, and in considering students’ demonstrated learning rather than their major program or degree. This trend signals a need for more hands-on or experiential learning before a student graduates, rather than on-the-job training.

A recent report from Strada shows that students also see this gap; a majority of those surveyed opted to participate in work-based learning to prepare them for a chosen profession or improve their odds as a job candidate.

Report authors also note opportunities for institutions to enhance on-campus experiences to better equip students for the world of work, such as providing professional networking, soft skill development and mentorship.

State of play: Increasingly, employers are emphasizing skills learned in higher education over content, citing a need for students to be adaptable and responsive to the evolving workplace. The drive toward skills-based hiring also stems in part from degree inflation and a re-leveling of jobs that actually require postsecondary education.

For students, this means a smaller share of entry-level positions require a bachelor’s degree. But some employers still screen by demonstrated skills, such as those gained through internships, rather than grades.

Not every student is able to participate in an internship. A 2025 survey from Handshake found that 12 percent of students have not participated in an internship and do not expect to do so before they graduate. Barriers to participation include caregiving responsibilities, limited access to internship opportunities or needing to work for pay. A 2024 report from the Business-Higher Education Forum found that students of color, first-generation students and community college students were less likely than their peers to secure an internship.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) published research in May pointing to the benefit of experiential learning for early career outcomes; students who engaged in work-based learning were more likely to say they had better-than-expected career progress, higher salaries and greater general career satisfaction, compared to their peers who lacked an internship.

Methodology

Strada’s National Survey of Work-based Learning includes 2,000 responses from seniors at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. The study was fielded between October and December 2024.

The study: Strada’s survey found that 65 percent of students participate in work-based learning to gain experience or skills in a specific career or their chosen profession. This echoes Handshake’s survey from early this year, which found that 87 percent of students pursue internships to build valuable skills.

“Today’s students are much more likely to view their experiences as instrumental rather than exploratory,” according to the Strada report.

Thirteen percent said they selected work-based learning experiences as an exploration of work, and approximately 8 percent said their main purpose was to land a job at their host organization.

Students saw paid internships and undergraduate research as most valuable for improving their standing as candidates for future jobs. Practicums were also rated highly, which could include clinical experiences in the health professions or student-teaching roles. Unpaid internships, project-based learning, on-campus jobs and off-campus jobs were seen as less valuable.

Among students who participated in multiple experiential learning opportunities, 81 percent ranked their most valuable experience as at least a seven out of 10. One in four respondents gave that experience a 10 out of 10.

Students who rated their experiences highly were also more likely to say they expanded their professional networking as participants. Students who worked as paid interns or unpaid interns were most likely to say they expanded their professional network.

Practicum participants were most likely to say they gained technical skills relevant to their career goals, followed by project-based learning participants and paid interns. Those working on- or off-campus jobs were least likely to report technical skill development.

By comparison, interns were most likely to report learning broad skills, also called enduring or soft skills.

On- and off-campus job experiences were rated lowest among respondents for a variety of factors, including value added to their persona as a job applicant, increased technical or durable skills, professional networking and mentorship.

Role of higher ed: Past surveys have shown that students believe their institution has a role to play in giving them internship experience.

A winter 2023 survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found that 62 percent of students believe their career center should help them get an internship. A 2024 Student Voice survey found that 48 percent of respondents think their institution should focus on helping students find internships and jobs, and 38 percent believe colleges should focus more on helping students prepare for internship and career success.

Students say faculty should also help in this process; one in five Student Voice respondents indicated professors are at least partially responsible for helping students find internships.

Strada’s report includes recommendations for colleges and universities such as:
- Set a goal for each student to have at least one work-based learning experience while enrolled.
- Integrate more work-based learning into the classroom and on-campus jobs.
- Leverage employer feedback to create skill development opportunities in on-campus opportunities, such as courses and projects.
- Establish spaces to introduce students to employers or other professionals who can add to their professional network.
How does your college or university prepare students for the world of work? Tell us more.
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July 25, 2025
Columbia’s Agreement: A Win for Authoritarianism

Columbia’s Agreement: A Win for Authoritarianism

Elizabeth Redden

Fri, 07/25/2025 – 03:00 AM

The disastrous deal between Columbia and the federal government only strengthens illiberal rule behind a façade of liberal values, Austin Sarat writes.

Byline(s)

Austin Sarat

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July 25, 2025
Johns Hopkins Press Plans to License Books to Train AI

Authors have until the end of August to opt out.

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Johns Hopkins University Press (JHUP) is the latest academic publisher to announce plans to license its books to train proprietary large language models. According to an email JHUP sent to authors Tuesday, those who want to opt out of the licensing agreement have until Aug. 31 to sign an addendum to their contracts; otherwise their work is fair game.

The move comes as Johns Hopkins University—the nation’s largest spender on university-based research and development—is facing big budget holes created by the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to federal grants.

“While we do not anticipate huge financial gain for individual books, the cumulative revenue [from LLM licensing deals] would be meaningful for Johns Hopkins University Press and our mission,” read the email sent to authors. “As we anticipate contraction in the higher-education market, these funds can help to sustain our important work as a non-profit publisher.”

While JHUP is not currently operating at a deficit, its executive director, Barbara Kline Pope, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed that the publisher is “exploring how our financial model may need to evolve over the coming years.” Pope did not answer Inside Higher Ed’s specific questions about which company or companies it plans to license book content to, but said that it’s “currently exploring partnerships with both general AI companies and those focused on specialized content and inference models like Retrieval-Augmented Generation,” which can incorporate external information sources to enhance the authority of an LLM’s response.

The press maintains a backlist of about 3,000 titles and publishes roughly 150 new books a year by faculty and other experts in fields such as public health, science, higher education and the humanities. It told authors that they can expect to receive “modest” returns of less than $100 per title per license.

While JHUP did not provide a specific dollar figure for how much revenue it expects to generate from the licensing agreement, some of the biggest scholarly publishers have already proven that there’s money to be made in licensing content to AI companies.

In the two-plus years since generative artificial intelligence tools have gone mainstream, major for-profit academic publishers, including Wiley and Informa (Taylor & Francis’s parent company), have signed agreements with AI companies. While some optimistic authors and observers have said such deals mean well-researched, accurate data will be used to train AI models, others have pushed back. Last summer, authors were outraged after Taylor & Francis failed to notify them before selling their work to Microsoft for $10 million. By the end of 2024, Taylor & Francis reported a $75 million profit as a result of the sale, which boosted its underlying revenue growth from 3 percent to 15 percent in one year, according to Bloomberg.

In addition to JHUP, other nonprofit publishers are jumping on the AI bandwagon—or at least thinking about it. Last year, Oxford University Press confirmed it was working with AI companies to develop LLMs, while the university itself launched a five-year partnership with OpenAI this past spring. Cambridge University Press is still in the process of weighing AI licensing agreements, though it’s also given authors the opportunity to opt out of any future AI-related aggregation efforts. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press said in November that multiple AI companies have approached about a licensing agreement; it responded by asking authors for their input and has not publicly announced a deal.

In its notice to authors this week, JHUP said it spent the last year weighing the possibility of licensing its works to train LLMs. In addition to potential financial gain, the press explained that it is deciding to move forward now because an LLM licensing agreement would make authors’ work more discoverable by their intended readers, create some guardrails around content use amid increasing concerns that major LLM companies are already scraping pirated versions of JHUP’s book content, and make a stronger legal case that such companies should be required to pay for access to the publisher’s content.

Sharon Ann Murphy, a history and classics professor at Providence College in Rhode Island who signed two contracts with JHUP long before the rise of LLMs, said she was not surprised—but nonetheless upset—by the notice from JHUP, which includes language from the opt-out addendum. It requires authors who don’t want to license their work to acknowledge that in addition to not receiving any AI-related royalties, “the sales and reach of the Work may suffer as a result of or in relation to the fact that Hopkins Press will not exercise AI Rights with respect to the Work.”

Murphy said she interpreted JHUP’s opt-out clause to mean that authors “are agreeing that they’re going to lose revenue because of this and Hopkins has no responsibility to protect us.”

Murphy is also skeptical of JHUP’s claims in its email to authors that if LLMs adopt technologies that credit the sources of AI-generated response, it will give readers the ability “to identify and click through to the original source” and is “the best way to continue to engage with readers and disseminate (authors’) work widely.”

“They’re saying that somehow this will promote our work, but that’s a specious argument. That’s not how AI models work,” Murphy said. “Academic presses are operating on shoestring budgets, but this seems really short-sighted. Academic presses are in the business of creating real knowledge, but AI is in the business of hallucinating and making stuff up.”

Annette Windhorn, a spokesperson for the Association of University Presses, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed that she’s not sure just how many academic presses have agreed to license their content to AI companies.

“An internal query to member presses more than a year ago did reveal that a number of presses had been approached by a variety of companies, but almost none were at that time actually considering an agreement and many presses were deferring initial decision points to university counsel,” she wrote. “Our members are following developments closely, but moving with caution in areas that may impact their authors’, their institutions’, or their own rights and responsibilities.”

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July 25, 2025
UNC System Mandates Reports on DEI Compliance

The University of North Carolina System’s Board of Governors issued a memorandum requiring each of the system’s 17 campuses to develop a subcommittee to evaluate the campus’s compliance with the system’s anti-diversity, equity and inclusion policy, The Assembly reported.

They have until Sept. 1 to show how they have complied with the policy, which cancelled previous DEI guidance and mandated neutrality from administrators on political and social issues. As a result of that policy, UNC campuses reported that they laid off dozens of staffers, moved 131 people to new positions, and redirected $16 million in DEI spending to student success and wellbeing programs.

According to the memo, the reviews should include briefings with chancellors about employees whose jobs were changed as a result of the DEI ban.

“These confidential reviews should compare an individual’s prior position to his or her new responsibilities, including how the employee’s performance in that role has changed, and what safeguards exist to ensure an employee’s previous responsibilities do not continue in the present role,” the memo states. “Confidential briefings from the chancellor on any disciplinary action taken against personnel should occur at this time as well.”

The memo comes after four UNC employees were secretly filmed by a conservative nonprofit discussing circumventing DEI restrictions; three of those employees are no longer employed by their universities.

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July 25, 2025
Trump Aims to Save College Sports with Executive Order

The Trump administration threw its hat in the ring Thursday amid growing debates over how best to manage compensation for college athletes, issuing an executive order titled Saving College Sports.

It comes just over 24 hours after House Republicans in two separate committees advanced legislation concerning the same topic.

“The future of college sports is under unprecedented threat,” the order stated. “A national solution is urgently needed to prevent this situation from deteriorating beyond repair and to protect non-revenue sports, including many women’s sports, that comprise the backbone of intercollegiate athletics, drive American superiority at the Olympics … and catalyze hundreds of thousands of student-athletes to fuel American success in myriad ways.”

Ever since legal challenges and new state laws drove the National Collegiate Athletic Association to allow student-athletes to profit off their own name, image and likeness in 2021, America has entered a new era that many refer to as the wild west of college sports.

Lawmakers have long scrutinized this unregulated market, arguing that it allows the wealthiest colleges to buy the best players. But a recent settlement, finalized in June, granted colleges the power to directly pay their athletes, elevating the dispute to a new level. Many fear that disproportionate revenue-sharing among the most watched sports, namely men’s football and basketball, will hurt women’s athletics and Olympic sports including soccer and track and field.

By directing colleges to preserve and expand scholarships for those sports and provide the maximum number of roster spots permitted under NCAA rules, the Trump administration hopes to prevent such a monopolization.

The order also disallows third-party, pay-for-play compensation that has become common among the wealthiest institutions and booster clubs, and mandates that any revenue-sharing permitted between universities and collegiate athletes should be implemented in a manner that protects women’s and nonrevenue sports.

Many sports law experts are skeptical about the order, suggesting it’s unlikely to move the needle and might create new legal challenges instead.

However, Representative Tim Walberg, a Michigan Republican and chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, thanked the president for his commitment to supporting student-athletes and strengthening college athletics.

“The SCORE Act, led by our three committees, will complement the President’s executive order,” Walberg said. “We look forward to working with all of our colleagues in Congress to build a stronger and more durable college sports environment.”

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July 25, 2025
Columbia Settlement Offers a Warning for Higher Ed

The Trump administration’s landmark settlement with Columbia University threatens the institution’s independence and academic freedom, higher education experts say. Many warn that the agreement marks a threat not only to higher education, but also to democracy at large.

The agreement, announced Wednesday, comes after Columbia faced months of intense pressure from the White House to address alleged antisemitism on campus and agree to a number of demands. It’s the latest example of how this administration is pushing the boundaries of its authority to secure changes that conservatives have long sought in higher ed.

In the end, Columbia agreed to comply with the government’s extensive demands while forking over more than $200 million to unlock $400 million in federal grants.

Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the long-anticipated deal as an example of “commonsense reform,” saying in a statement that Americans have “watched in horror” for decades as the most esteemed campuses were occupied by “anti-western teachings and a leftist groupthink.”

“Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit and civil debate,” she added. “I believe they will ripple across the higher education sector and change the course of campus culture for years to come.”

But some higher education faculty, legal experts and free speech advocates say the settlement is unlawful, pointing to the quick investigation, vague allegations and unprecedented way federal funds were retracted before Columbia had a chance to appeal. Some went as far as to compare the executive actions to past power grabs by authoritarian leaders in countries like Hungary, Turkey and Brazil.

The very real danger is that if elite institutions choose to submit to the authority of the Trump administration, the whole rest of the industry will follow.”

Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America

Columbia’s capitulation “represents the upending of a decades-long partnership between the government and higher education in which colleges and universities nevertheless retained academic freedom, institutional autonomy and shared governance,” said Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. “It signals a rise in authoritarian populism in which higher education is positioned as the enemy in a fight against corrupt, inefficient and elite institutions that are out of touch with the needs of the working class.”

A federal taskforce convened to combat antisemitism first presented the university with the sweeping list of demands in March. The decision was simple: comply or permanently lose the federal funds that were frozen a week prior. The Ivy League institution agreed a week later to nearly all of the president’s demands. But the funds remained frozen.

McMahon and other Trump administration officials signed the agreement with Columbia.

Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Though Columbia was on the “right track,” McMahon and other task force members said the university had a long way to go. While talks with Columbia continued, the task force turned its focus to Harvard University and made similar demands. The Crimson, however, rejected the task force’s mandates and sued after it froze more than $2.7 billion in federal funds.

Many higher education leaders say that Columbia had a choice and chickened out. But regardless, they add, Trump’s ultimatum amounted to extortion.

“Whether you applaud or despise the terms of the deal, the way in which the government is operating, and getting universities like Columbia to make these deals is fundamentally coercive,” said David Pozen, a constitutional law professor at Columbia. “Therefore, it poses a significant threat to the future of higher education as well as the rule of law.”

Pozen and others fear that this will only further embolden Trump to take similar strikes at more institutions.

“The very real danger is that if elite institutions choose to submit to the authority of the Trump administration, the whole rest of the industry will follow,” said Kevin Carey, vice president of education and work at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “It will be like a stack of dominoes one falling after the other.”

Chilling First Amendment Rights

The Trump administration has said the measures taken against Columbia were necessary to address antisemitism on the campus as officials accused the university of failing to protect Jewish students and later said Columbia violated federal civil rights law.

As part of the settlement, Columbia is paying $21 million to address allegations that Jewish employees faced discrimination. The agreement also requires the university to hire a student liaison to support Jewish students.

But the settlement goes beyond antisemitism and focuses on unrelated campus policies. For example, starting in paragraph 16, the administration says that Columbia students cannot reference race in admissions essays and mandates that the university must provide annual data showing both rejected and admitted students broken down by racial demographics, grade point averages and test scores.

When campuses like Columbia and Harvard allowed antisemitism to run amok, the consequences were going to follow. The chickens had come home to roost.”

Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute

The settlement also requires similar data concerning the admission of international students, bans the participation of transgender women in female sports and calls for Columbia to establish a process to ensure that all students “are committed to the longstanding traditions of American universities, including civil discourse, free inquiry, open debate, and the fundamental values of equality and respect.”

In Carey’s view, by buckling to the Trump administration, Columbia surrendered its identity as a private institution—and so would any other university that follows suit.

“The essence of an independent university is deciding who is part of your academic community, and Columbia University has surrendered that,” he said, referring to the admissions provisions.

Will Creeley, legal director of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that, in addition to admission practices, this settlement and its “blatant disregard for federal law” will upend academia’s core commitment to fostering First Amendment rights.

“The reforms themselves require Columbia students to commit to laudable values like free inquiry and open debate,” Creeley wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “But demanding students commit to vague goals like ‘equality and respect’ leaves far too much room for abuse, just like the civility oaths, DEI statements, and other types of compelled speech FIRE has long opposed.”

Michael Thaddeus, a Columbia math professor and president of the faculty union chapter, said though administrators insist they won’t allow the government to interfere, that assurance doesn’t mean such acts won’t occur.

“Students and scholars at American universities must be free to think and speak their minds,” he wrote in a statement to Inside Higher Ed. “The settlement … risks imperiling this freedom.”

Ditching Due Process

Beyond the terms of the settlement itself, education advocates are primarily concerned with the process used to reach the agreement, which they said didn’t follow procedural norms.

Pozen, the Columbia law professor, outlined in a blog post Wednesday night how the task force bypassed nearly all statutory requirements of such an investigation.

This administration must return to following the rule of law.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education

Past administrations, Pozen explained, have pushed the boundaries of regulation, utilizing more guidance letters and fewer formal rule-making sessions with public comment. But even those enforcement strategies consisted of policies that applied to all institutions and were based on thorough investigations, not rushed accusations, he added.

“The means being used to push through these reforms are as unprincipled as they are unprecedented,” Pozen wrote. “Higher education policy in the United States is now being developed through ad hoc deals, a mode of regulation that is not only inimical to the ideal of the university as a site of critical thinking but also corrosive to the democratic order and to law itself.”

Conservative higher education experts who support the administration’s approach acknowledged that it lacked due process, but also argued that Columbia deserved the stipulations and financial penalty it faced.

“When campuses like Columbia and Harvard allowed antisemitism to run amok, the consequences were going to follow,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. “The chickens had come home to roost.”

Hess added that the Trump administration was not the first to “short circuit” regulatory processes, citing the Biden administration’s loan forgiveness campaign and Obama’s use of the gender equity law, Title IX, to combat sexual assault as examples.

“We live in a time when concern for legal requirements and norms is increasingly dismissed across the political spectrum,” so to chastise one administration for skipping steps and not the other is problematic, he said. “I continue to be deeply troubled every time [the procedural statutes] are broken. But you cannot have asymmetrical expectations for the parties in these kinds of debates.”

Shifting the Political Paradigm

While a few figures, including former Harvard president and treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, applauded the resolution, many faculty members and higher education leaders expressed fear that their institutions could be next.

Columbia’s reforms are a roadmap for elite universities that wish to regain the confidence of the American public by renewing their commitment to truth-seeking, merit and civil debate.”

Education Secretary Linda McMahon

Kirsten Weld, a history professor and president of the Harvard faculty union chapter, said she is “very concerned” and rejects any suggestion that Columbia’s settlement should be a “blueprint” for her own institution’s negotiations.

“This is about deploying the coercive power of the federal government to dictate to universities, faculty, and students what they should teach, research, and learn, on ideological grounds,” she wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “It is a dangerous abuse of federal regulatory and civil rights enforcement authority to obtain … what it would otherwise be unable to mandate through proper legislative channels.”

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, also suggested via email that “this cannot be a template for the government’s approach to American higher education.”

This administration “reached a conclusion before an investigation and levied a penalty without affording Columbia due process—that is chilling,” he wrote. “This administration must return to following the rule of law.”

But many policy experts are doubtful that will happen any time soon.

When looking beyond just Harvard and Columbia, one thing becomes clear, said Dominique Baker, an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware, the president is inciting an “outright attack” on higher education, and he has no plans of slowing down.

From the political ousting of University of Virginia president James Ryan to the legislative termination of countless academic programs in Indiana with little to no faculty input, Baker identified one defining thread: curtailing the power of democratic institutions.

“We are in a very dangerous time, both for U.S. higher education, but more importantly for our country,” she explained. “These types of outright attacks on colleges and universities are typically the moves of autocrats and dictators, often seen as signs of authoritarian takeovers.”

She later added, “if one wanted to overthrow our constitutional republic, these are the types of moves you would make.”

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July 25, 2025
Faculty better get active on AI and academic freedom.
Is AI an academic freedom issue?

Of course.

Education technology as a whole is an academic freedom issue, unfortunately, the encroachment of technological systems which shape (and in some cases even determine) pedagogy, research and governance have been left in the hands of others, with faculty required to capitulate to a system designed and controlled by others.

AI is here, rather suddenly, pretty disruptively, and in a big way. Different institutions are adopting different stances and much of the adaptation is falling on faculty, in some cases with minimal guidance. While considering how these tools impact what’s happening at the level of course and pedagogy is a necessity, it also seems clear that faculty concerned about preserving their own rights should be considering some of the institutional/structural issues.

Personally, I have more questions than answers at this time, but there’s a handful of recent readings that I want to recommend to others to help ground thinking that may lead to better questions and actionable answers.

A report, Artificial Intelligence and the Academic Professions, just released by the AAUP, should be at the top of anyone’s list. Based on a national survey, the report examines a number of big-picture categories, all of which have a direct relationship to issues of academic freedom.
1. Improving Professional Development Regarding AI and Technology Harms
2. Implementing Shared Governance Policies and Professional Oversight
3. Improving Working and Learning Conditions
4. Demanding Transparency and the Ability to Opt Out
5. Protecting Faculty Members and Other Academic Workers.
The report both summarizes faculty concerns as expressed in the survey and offers recommendations for actions that will protect faculty rights and autonomy. Having read the report, in some cases the recommendations initially seem frustratingly vague but looked at in total, they are essentially a call for active faculty involvement in considering the implications of the intersection of this technology (and the companies developing it) with educational institutions.

In a way, the report highlights, in hindsight, how truly absent faculty have been as existing educational technology has been woven into the fabric of our institutions, and that it would be a disaster for that absence to be perpetuated when it comes to AI.

After checking out the AAUP report, move on to Matt Seybold’s, How Venture Capitalists Built A For-Profit “Micro-University” Inside Our Public Flagships, published at his newsletter, The American Vandal. It’s a long and complicated story about the ways outside service providers conceived in venture capital/private equity have insinuated themselves into our universities in ways that undermine faculty roles and educational quality.

It would take a full column to do Seybold’s piece justice, but here are two quotes that I hope induce you to go consider his full argument.

Here Seybold pulls the lid back on what it means for these third-party provider offerings to exist under a university brand “powered by” the third-party provider:

The “powered by model” is a truly absurdist role reversal. A private, unaccredited company founded and run by sales and marketing professionals is responsible for the (pseudo)educational coursework, while the accredited university is employed only for its sales and marketing functions, getting paid by commission on the headcount of students who enroll from their branded portal. University partners are incentivized to flex their brand power and use their proprietary data, advertising budgets, and sales forces to maximize this commission, while Ziplines provides cookie-cutter landing pages and highly reproducible microdegrees, the content of which is largely created by gigworkers.

And here, Seybold pinpoints the downstream effect of these kinds of “partnerships.”

EdTech is not only always a Trojan horse for elite capture of public resources; it is also always a project in delegitimizing the project of public education itself.

The applicability of Seybold’s analysis to the “AI partnerships” many institutions are busy signing should be clear.

As another thought experiment exercise, I recommend making your way through a Hollis Robbins’s piece at her Anecdotal website, How to Deliver CSU’s Gen Ed with AI.

Robbins, a former university dean, perhaps intends this more as a provocation than an actionable proposal but, as a proposal, it is a comprehensive vision for replacing human labor with AI instruction that relies on a series of interwoven tech applications where humans are “in the loop,” but which largely run autonomously.

If realized, this sort of vision would obviate academic freedom on two fronts:
1. The curriculum would be codified and assessed according to a rigid standard and then be delivered primarily through AI.
2. Faculty would barely exist.
I read it as a surveillance-driven dystopia from which I would either have to opt-out (if allowed), or more likely have to flee, but you can check the comments to the post itself and find some early enthusiasts. The complexity of the technological vision suggests that such a vision would be difficult to impossible to realize, but the underlying values of increased efficiency, decreased cost and increased standardization are consistent with the direction educational systems have been going for decades.

Many of the factors that have eroded faculty rights and left institutions vulnerable to the attacks that have been coming were, indeed, foreseeable. Adjunctification is at the top of my list.

When it comes to technology and the university, we’ve seen this play before. If faculty aren’t prepared to assert their rights and exercise their power, you won’t see me writing the kinds of lamentations I’ve offered about tenure over the years because there won’t be enough faculty left to worry about such things.
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July 25, 2025