Tag: News

The Case Against AI Disclosure Statements (opinion)
I used to require my students submit AI disclosure statements any time they used generative AI on an assignment. I won’t be doing that anymore.

From the beginning of our current AI-saturated moment, I leaned into ChatGPT, not away, and was an early adopter of AI in my college composition classes. My early adoption of AI hinged on the need for transparency and openness. Students had to disclose to me when and how they were using AI. I still fervently believe in those values, but I no longer believe that required disclosure statements help us achieve them.

Look. I get it. Moving away from AI disclosure statements is antithetical to many of higher ed’s current best practices for responsible AI usage. But I started questioning the wisdom of the disclosure statement in spring 2024, when I noticed a problem. Students in my composition courses were turning in work that was obviously created with the assistance of AI, but they failed to proffer the required disclosure statements. I was puzzled and frustrated. I thought to myself, “I allow them to use AI; I encourage them to experiment with it; all I ask is that they tell me they’re using AI. So, why the silence?” Chatting with colleagues in my department who have similar AI-permissive attitudes and disclosure requirements, I found they were experiencing similar problems. Even when we were telling our students that AI usage was OK, students still didn’t want to fess up.

Fess up. Confess. That’s the problem.

Mandatory disclosure statements feel an awful lot like a confession or admission of guilt right now. And given the culture of suspicion and shame that dominates so much of the AI discourse in higher ed at the moment, I can’t blame students for being reluctant to disclose their usage. Even in a class with a professor who allows and encourages AI use, students can’t escape the broader messaging that AI use should be illicit and clandestine.

AI disclosure statements have become a weird kind of performative confession: an apology performed for the professor, marking the honest students with a “scarlet AI,” while the less scrupulous students escape undetected (or maybe suspected, but not found guilty).

As well intentioned as mandatory AI disclosure statements are, they have backfired on us. Instead of promoting transparency and honesty, they further stigmatize the exploration of ethical, responsible and creative AI usage and shift our pedagogy toward more surveillance and suspicion. I suggest that it is more productive to assume some level of AI usage as a matter of course, and, in response, adjust our methods of assessment and evaluation while simultaneously working toward normalizing the usage of AI tools in our own work.

Studies show that AI disclosure carries risks both in and out of the classroom. One study published in May reports that any kind of disclosure (both voluntary and mandatory) in a wide variety of contexts resulted in decreased trust in the person using AI (this remained true even when study participants had prior knowledge of an individual’s AI usage, meaning, the authors write, “The observed effect can be attributed primarily to the act of disclosure rather than to the mere fact of AI usage.”)

Another recent article points to the gap present between the values of honesty and equity when it comes to mandatory AI disclosure: People won’t feel safe to disclose AI usage if there’s an underlying or perceived lack of trust and respect.

Some who hold unfavorable attitudes toward AI will point to these findings as proof that students should just avoid AI usage altogether. But that doesn’t strike me as realistic. Anti-AI bias will only drive student AI usage further underground and lead to fewer opportunities for honest dialogue. It also discourages the kind of AI literacy employers are starting to expect and require.

Mandatory AI disclosure for students isn’t conducive to authentic reflection but is instead a kind of virtue signaling that chills the honest conversation we should want to have with our students. Coercion only breeds silence and secrecy.

Mandatory AI disclosure also does nothing to curb or reduce the worst features of badly written AI papers, including the vague, robotic tone; the excess of filler language; and, their most egregious hallmark, the fabricated sources and quotes.

Rather than demanding students confess their AI crimes to us through mandatory disclosure statements, I advocate both a shift in perspective and a shift of assignments. We need to move from viewing students’ AI assistance as a special exception warranting reactionary surveillance to accepting and normalizing AI usage as a now commonplace feature of our students’ education.

That shift does not mean we should allow and accept any and all student AI usage. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to reading AI slop that a student generates in an attempt to avoid learning. When confronted with a badly written AI paper that sounds nothing like the student who submitted it, the focus shouldn’t be on whether the student used AI but on why it’s not good writing and why it fails to satisfy the assignment requirements. It should also go without saying that fake sources and quotes, regardless of whether they are of human or AI origin, should be called out as fabrications that won’t be tolerated.

We have to build assignments and evaluation criteria that disincentivize the kinds of unskilled AI usage that circumvent learning. We have to teach students basic AI literacy and ethics. We have to build and foster learning environments that value transparency and honesty. But real transparency and honesty require safety and trust before they can flourish.

We can start to build such a learning environment by working to normalize AI usage with our students. Some ideas that spring to mind include:
- Telling students when and how you use AI in your own work, including both successes and failures in AI usage.
- Offering clear explanations to students about how they could use AI productively at different points in your class and why they might not want to use AI at other points. (Danny Liu’s Menus model is an excellent example of this strategy.)
- Adding an assignment such as an AI usage and reflection journal, which offers students a low-stakes opportunity to experiment with AI and reflect upon the experience.
- Adding an opportunity for students to present to the class on at least one cool, weird or useful thing that they did with AI (maybe even encouraging them to share their AI failures, as well).
The point with these examples is that we are inviting students into the messy, exciting and scary moment we all find ourselves in. They shift the focus away from coerced confessions to a welcoming invitation to join in and share their own wisdom, experience and expertise that they accumulate as we all adjust to the age of AI.

Julie McCown is an associate professor of English at Southern Utah University. She is working on a book about how embracing AI disruption leads to more engaging and meaningful learning for students and faculty.
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October 28, 2025
Improving Community College Transfer in California
California has established significant goals for postsecondary attainment, with the stated aim of having 70 percent of working-age adults hold a credential of value by 2035. To meet this goal, the state has invested time and resources into the community college system and upward transfer processes, seeking to create affordable and accessible pathways in and through higher education.

A recently published report by the Public Policy Institute of California Higher Education Center found that a large share of community college students are applying to and enrolling in state universities to complete a bachelor’s degree, but equity gaps persist among certain demographic groups.

The data highlights the importance of focusing on early benchmarks of academic progress—including credit completion rates, GPA and the stated goal of transfer—to help students succeed in making the transition to a four-year university. The report also underscores that some transfer students are willing to pay more and travel farther to attend a more selective institution.

The background: California’s public higher education system is the largest and most diverse in the country, the report authors note. The California Community College system includes 116 institutions enrolling over 2.1 million students, and the California State University system consists of 22 institutions educating nearly half a million students. Within the state, the system is the top destination for upward transfer, with 58 percent of community college students going on to enroll at a CSU campus.

Over the past decade, the two college systems have partnered to streamline transfer opportunities. One innovation is the associate degree for transfer (A.D.T.), a group of 40 academic pathways that guarantee admission to students who complete 60 credits toward a bachelor’s degree in a specific major. Another is the CSU Transfer Planner, which provides insights for students to navigate transferable credits, degree programs and campus requirements for transfer.

The report looks at student demographic information, academic progress and participation in transfer pathways such as A.D.T. to identify success indicators in the transfer pipeline.

Methodology

Researchers analyzed data from the CSU Application and Admission Dashboard and longitudinal student-level data from fall 2018 and fall 2023.

In the sample, 48 percent of transfer applicants were Latino, 26 percent white, 15 percent Asian and 4.5 percent Black. A majority were 24 years old or younger, and 75 percent received a California Promise Grant or a Pell Grant while in community college.

The data: The average student spends nine semesters at a community college before applying to a CSU institution, researchers found.

Students are required to complete 60 credits to transfer with junior-level standing, but the median student completed 71.5 credits. Only half of applicants had earned an A.D.T. before applying, and 22 percent earned a local associate degree, meaning about 30 percent of students applied for transfer without a credential.

Researchers noted that students who made significant progress in their first year of community college were more likely to transfer. Those who successfully completed transfer-level math in their first year applied to CSU after seven terms on average, whereas student who didn’t applied after 10 community college terms.

Students who were 25 or older, Black or financial aid recipients were less likely to meet early milestones and therefore less likely to transfer. Conversely, students with high GPAs were more likely to transfer.

The data also indicated a gap between students eligible for admission at a CSU and those who actually applied. One in five students who completed an A.D.T. never applied to CSU despite having guaranteed admission. Of those, 43 percent enrolled at a different university, many in the University of California system.

In total, 87 percent of A.D.T. recipients declared a transfer goal while at community college, but approximately 20 percent of them didn’t continue on to a bachelor’s degree program.

A majority (92 percent) of all transfers were eventually admitted to at least one CSU, and 63 percent of all transfers enrolled. Three in 10 applied more than once, and almost half of them (47 percent) had their application denied the first time.

“It is possible that these students were initially rejected from the campus of their choice (or to all campuses), took more community college classes, and then gained admission,” researchers wrote. On the flip side, a large share of those whose transfer applications were rejected applied only once (88 percent), and to only one campus (61 percent).

Admissions data also revealed the importance of academic benchmarks early in the student’s community college career. Admission rates for students who took transfer-level math or English in their first year were higher compared to their peers who did not; similarly, students who earned 24 transferable credits were more likely to gain admission to a CSU. Unsurprisingly, students who stated a transfer goal, completed the A.D.T. or had a GPA of 3.25 or higher also had high admittance rates.

One trend researchers noted is that students who were admitted to a CSU but chose to enroll at a different institution were more likely to select a college that was farther away or more expensive, indicating that cost and proximity are not deciding factors. Transfers also enrolled at more selective colleges compared to their peers who opted to enroll at CSU, though some students selected universities with lower graduation rates than CSU.

Over all, transfer students had high graduation rates. Among the incoming fall 2020 cohort, 76 percent graduated with their bachelor’s degree in four years, and 69 percent completed it in three years. About 19 percent of students left the CSU system without graduating three years after enrolling, and these students were more likely to be Black, Latino, male or older or have financial need.

Recommendations: Based on their findings, researchers identified three opportunities for improvement:
1. Invest in the student’s first year. Interventions including dual enrollment, corequisite English and math courses, proactive advising, and flexible scheduling can promote early momentum and academic success for community college students.
2. Collect additional data on enrollment decisions. While system data showed that some students opt out of a four-year degree program, researchers emphasized the need for student voices to understand why those admitted would not enroll at CSU. Researchers also noted a need for campus-specific data, “because there is high variation across individual CSUs in both acceptance and enrollment rates.”
3. Create space at selective campuses and in high-demand majors. “Some of the students who were never admitted to CSU were competitive applicants, but they applied to the most in-demand campuses,” the authors wrote. To increase capacity for these students, researchers suggest flexible course scheduling options, co-locating campuses or expanding online degree programs.
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October 28, 2025
Director of Online Program Development at UVA

The origins of “Featured Gigs” trace back to the first post in the series with Kemi Jona, vice provost for online education and digital innovation at UVA. While I had the idea for the series, it was Kemi who ultimately came up with most of the language for the four questions we use to explore opportunities at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change. Today, Kemi answers questions about the role of director of online program development.

Q: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?

A: The 2030 Plan calls on the university to expand the reach of its educational programs—both in person and online—and to make UVA more accessible, including to learners across and beyond the Commonwealth. The University of Virginia’s Office of the Vice Provost for Online Education and Digital Innovation is a key part of advancing this charge on behalf of the university, helping our schools and institutes design, deliver and scale high-quality online and hybrid programs that extend UVA’s reach and impact.

The director of online program development plays a central role in advancing UVA’s online education goals. The role is ideal for someone who thrives at the intersection of strategy, innovation and execution. The director will not only guide program development but also help UVA build the internal capacity and frameworks needed to sustain this growth long-term. This is a high-impact, high-visibility position that will help shape the next chapter of online and hybrid learning at UVA and potentially serve as a model for the sector.

Q: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?

A: This role sits within the provost’s office and reports directly to the vice provost for online education and digital innovation. The director will guide UVA schools and institutes through the planning, launch and evaluation of new online and hybrid programs, serving as a trusted partner to deans, associate deans, program directors and faculty.

This individual will bring structure and strategy to UVA’s online growth, helping schools scope opportunities, assess market demand, support business case development and build the readiness needed for sustained success. The role requires exceptional communication, diplomacy and systems-level thinking to align multiple stakeholders around a shared vision.

Q: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?

A: In service of the vision articulated in the 2030 Plan and aligned to the strategic goals of our partner schools and institutes, UVA is undertaking ambitious growth in its online and hybrid portfolio. In the first year, success means ensuring active projects move from planning to launch with clarity and momentum, establishing shared frameworks, timelines and accountability across partners.

Within three years, success will be measured not only in the number of successful program launches but also in the maturity of UVA’s internal systems, talent and decision-making processes that enable continued agility and innovation.

Longer term, the director will help institutionalize a robust, repeatable, data-informed model for program development so UVA’s schools can innovate faster and with greater confidence, while ensuring that all programs uphold UVA’s reputation for academic excellence.

Q: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?

A: Because this individual will be deeply engaged in all aspects of online program design, development and launch, he or she will gain substantial experience working with deans, faculty and other senior leaders. This experience would help set up future leadership roles in online education and digital innovation or in the private sector.

This role offers a rare opportunity to operate at the heart of institutional transformation—building systems and partnerships that inform how UVA advances its mission as we begin our third century as a leading public institution. The experience will prepare the director for senior university leadership roles in strategy, academic innovation or digital transformation. It will equip them with the cross-sector perspective and executive acumen valued by both higher education and mission-driven organizations beyond academia.

Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology, and organizational change. If your gig is a good fit, featuring your gig on Featured Gigs is free.

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October 28, 2025
How Colleges Use Anti-Elitist and Elite-Adjacent Campaigns

High Point University in North Carolina sets itself apart by offering a luxury experience.

Wikipedia

Two university campaigns hit the national spotlight in recent weeks. Each tells a very different story about how colleges market themselves.

Colorado Mesa University’s new Featherstone University spoof takes aim at elite school stereotypes, ending with the line “We care about who you are, not who you know.”

Days later, The Wall Street Journal profiled High Point University in a turnaround story built on private wealth and exclusivity. Its campus features etiquette lessons, manicured gardens and an airplane cabin for networking drills. HPU prepares students for a world where who you know still matters.

In an industry criticized for sameness, both CMU and HPU stand out as strategic outliers.

Trust, Value and the Split in Demand

Public trust in higher education is fragile. Concerns over cost, access and free speech have left families asking if it is worth it. Against this backdrop, two playbooks are emerging: anti-elitist authenticity and elite-adjacent experience.

Playbook A: CMU’s Skepticism as Fuel

Colorado Mesa University’s “Welcome to Featherstone” flips elite-school marketing on its head. The parody ends with a challenge: “We don’t care about who you know. We care about you.”

For a public university serving rural, first-generation, working-class students, the message fits. CMU has built its brand on affordability, access and trust by cutting tuition, growing CMU Tech and guaranteeing free tuition for Colorado families earning $70,000 or less.

This isn’t simply mocking the elite; it’s segmentation. CMU speaks to families who see higher education as a bridge, not a birthright. In a sea of interchangeable ads, it uses satire to say, “We hear your skepticism—and we’re still here for you.”

A Take From Rural America

CMU’s approach hit a nerve, but it also hit a truth.

I was born in East Detroit, then raised in Richmond, Mich., a farming town of 4,000. When my parents learned our local high school wasn’t accredited, they sent my brothers and me to school an hour away. At that time, only 32 percent of the local high school graduates pursued college. I still remember junior high classmates missing school to plant and harvest corn and soybeans.

For rural communities like these, college can feel distant—financially and culturally. CMU’s campaign speaks to them with rare honesty.

Playbook B: High Point’s Experience as Advantage

If CMU sells authenticity, High Point sells aspiration. Its campus hums with classical music and fountains, lined with rocking chairs and gardens designed for conversation. Students dine in on-campus restaurants that double as lessons in professional etiquette, and housing options range from traditional dorms to $40,000 tiny homes.

President Nido Qubein calls it preparation, not pampering: “Half of Wall Street sends their kids here.” The model caters to families who can pay full price and want an environment that mirrors the careers their children expect to enter.

It’s not subtle, but it shows the university understands its target audience. In an uncertain marketing environment, HPU is selling a vision of success that feels polished, predictable and safe.

What the Models Reveal

CMU and HPU reveal opposite, equally intentional strategies. CMU doubled down on affordability with its 2024 CMU Promise Tour, which reached 22 rural and urban communities, boosting first-year enrollment by 25 percent. HPU, meanwhile, courts families buying access and advantage through concierge-level amenities.

CMU uses satire to mock exclusivity; HPU leans into luxury to promise it. Both know exactly whom they’re speaking to.

Leadership Takeaways

In a landscape of sameness and skepticism, higher ed leaders should ask, “What do we stand for—and how do we prove it?”

Is it belonging and mobility like CMU, or exclusivity and polish like HPU? Either can work if it’s backed by programs, outcomes and transparency. Whatever your promise, ensure the experience delivers it.

Both institutions have likely alienated some audiences, but they’ve connected deeply with their own. That’s the point of strategic marketing. Their playbooks, while different, seem to be working for Colorado Mesa and High Point, which both had record enrollments in fall 2025 amid national headlines warning of a demographic cliff.

Beyond the Marketing

Beyond the spotlight, both universities must prove results. Time and measurement will tell if they are delivering on access and affordability, or on postgraduate success and networks.

Authenticity carries risk, as organizational psychologist Adam Grant recently noted in a New York Times op-ed, but when outcomes match promises, both models can be legitimate. Hide results or exaggerate benefits and either fails the test of ethics and equity.

In a nation this diverse, there is no single market for higher ed—there are many markets. And in a landscape this stratified, the unforgivable sin isn’t satire or spectacle; it’s sameness without substance.

Maria Kuntz is director of content marketing strategy and communications at the University of Colorado–Boulder. She leads content strategy for advancement, oversees the award-winning Coloradan alumni magazine and writes about storytelling, leadership and trust in higher education.

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October 28, 2025
AAUP President Exacerbated “Organizational Antisemitism”

Cassidy asked the AFT president to respond in writing to four questions by Nov. 6.

U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education Labor and Pensions

In a letter to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the education committee, accused American Association of University Professors president and AFT vice president Todd Wolfson of promoting “organizational antisemitism” within the AAUP.

Cassidy cited an August Inside Higher Ed interview with Wolfson in which the union leader stood against sending weapons to Israel, accused the Trump administration of weaponizing antisemitism for political gains and advocated for the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism, a definition of antisemitism that does not include anti-Zionism.

Cassidy also referenced a statement from Wolfson calling Vice President JD Vance a fascist as well as a March letter to the AAUP from the Anti-Defamation League and Academic Engagement Network that said “the AAUP [is] being perceived as increasingly moving in a virulently anti-Israel direction, and as a result, growing insensitive and even hostile to the concerns of its Jewish and Zionist members.”

“In the six months since he received this warning from one of the nation’s leading organizations dedicated to fighting antisemitism [ADL], Dr. Wolfson has not only failed to address these concerns but has exacerbated them,” Cassidy wrote. “Jewish faculty members deserve to carry out their work free from discrimination. As an association with a national presence, it is concerning that AFT has not only failed to help solve this problem but has made it worse by allowing Dr. Wolfson to continue to serve in a leadership role.”

The AAUP is an affiliate of the AFT, one of the largest unions nationwide for K–12 and higher education professionals. The two became formally affiliated in 2022 and share some leadership, including Wolfson.

Wolfson replied to Cassidy’s letter in a statement to Inside Higher Ed Monday.

“It appears Senator Cassidy and his GOP colleagues are furious that seven universities have rejected Trump’s absurd Higher Ed Loyalty Oath. Rather than reckon with their failed attempt to strong-arm higher education, they’ve chosen to complain to our national affiliate, AFT, because AAUP dared to hold a webinar,” Wolfson wrote, referring to an AAUP webinar called “Scholasticide in Palestine” that Cassidy referenced in the letter. “I would respectfully suggest they spend less time trying to undermine my constitutional rights and more time focusing on what Americans actually care about—like reopening the government, lowering healthcare costs, and addressing the cost-of-living crisis.”

Cassidy wants Weingarten to tell him by Nov. 6 how AFT is addressing the concerns raised by the ADL and to share more details about how she’s working with the AAUP to ensure Jewish members aren’t experiencing antisemitism. He also asked Weingarten whether AFT publicly condemns Wolfson’s remarks.

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October 28, 2025
$1.2B Fine, Nix Trans Athlete Wins, More

The Trump administration demanded that UCLA pay $1.2 billion and restrict student freedoms.

Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images

The details of the Trump administration’s demands on the University of California, Los Angeles—in addition to the previously reported $1.2 billion payout the federal government asked for—have finally been revealed. A lawsuit by UC faculty unions forced the higher ed system to release a copy of a draft resolution agreement, shedding light on the terms UC was first faced with nearly three months ago.

The Trump administration has demanded, among other things, that UCLA not enroll “foreign students likely to engage in anti-Western, anti-American, or antisemitic disruptions or harassment.” In the same paragraph, the proposed resolution agreement says UCLA would have to “socialize international students to the norms of a campus dedicated to free inquiry and open debate.”

The federal government also demanded that UCLA ban overnight campus demonstrations and mandate that masked campus protesters reveal their identities when asked.

Multiple provisions aim to limit transgender individuals’ rights. The document demands that UCLA’s medical school and affiliated hospitals stop “performing hormonal interventions and ‘transgender’ surgeries” on anyone under 18; stop allowing transgender women to play on women’s sports teams; strip records, awards and other recognition from transgender women athletes; and send personal apologies to the cisgender women who placed lower than trans athletes.

California voters banned affirmative action in public education nearly 30 years ago, but the demand letter suggests the Trump administration doesn’t think UCLA has complied. It would require UCLA to bar providing “information about candidates’ race, sex, ethnicity, or other protected characteristics to faculty or other UCLA personnel with decision-making authority over hiring, retention, promotion or tenure.”

Other provisions target affirmative action in hiring and student admissions, including a line that says, “UCLA shall discontinue race- and ethnicity-based scholarships.” The proposed agreement says “proxies used to effectuate race-based or sex-based outcomes” aren’t allowed in selecting for fellowship programs and also bans the use of such undefined proxies in hiring and admissions.

The document’s release comes after UC said in early August that it would negotiate with the federal government, citing the estimated $584 million in funding that at least three different federal agencies had announced they were suspending. That funding freeze followed a July 29 letter to UC from the Department of Justice, which said its months-long investigations across the system had so far concluded that in its response to a pro-Palestinian protest encampment in spring 2024, UCLA violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

It was yet another example of the Trump administration accusing a selective university of tolerating antisemitism and cutting off hundreds of millions of federal dollars. But, unlike Harvard and Columbia Universities, UCLA is a public institution, and its targeting by the federal government represents an expansion of the administration’s campaign to overhaul higher ed.

Last week, the University of Virginia became the first known public institution to settle with the administration over discrimination allegations. That settlement didn’t require a payout, but among other things, UVA committed to not use proxies for race; to end all diversity, equity and inclusion programming; and to prohibit trans athletes from participating in sports.

Media earlier reported some of the administration’s demands on UCLA, but university officials didn’t make the details public until Friday, when a lawsuit by the UCLA Faculty Association and Council of UC Faculty Associations forced them to.

“Accession to these demands would be to undermine everything that has made the UC the successful engine of social mobility and economic might that it has been for our state,” Anna Markowitz, president of the UCLA Faculty Association, wrote in an email. “It will harm undergraduate learning opportunities, and hamper UC’s ability to be a scholarly leader on the international stage. It enshrines ideology at the heart of the institution rather than decades of empirical and scholarly understanding. We stand against this extortion effort.”

Markowitz said the “UCLA FA and CUCFA have stood with our union colleagues in calling for no negotiations since the beginning.” The university administration “is under intense federal pressure,” she said, and she urged them to resist—“particularly because other faculty legal action has resulted in the restoration of nearly all of the temporarily suspended federal grants.”

Indeed, Stett Holbrook, a UC spokesperson, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed Monday that “as for terminated federal research funds, that figure is in the tens of millions”—a far cry from the August estimate of $584 million.

He provided a statement saying, “UC has been clear it must evaluate its response to the administration’s settlement proposal that, like all settlement communications, is confidential. As stated previously, the proposed $1.2 billion settlement payment alone would derail work that saves lives, grows our economy, and fortifies our national security. UC remains committed to protecting the mission, governance, and academic freedom of the University.”

White House and DOJ officials didn’t respond to requests for interviews Monday or answer written questions.

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October 27, 2025
National Institute on Transfer Prepares to Close

For over two decades, the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students has bridged two worlds—the researchers who study transfer students and the campus staff who work with them. Located at the University of North Georgia, NISTS has gathered these groups for annual conferences, disseminated resources and research, and doled out awards for groundbreaking work.

Now, university leaders say they can no longer afford to fund NISTS. At the end of October, NISTS, at least in its current form, will shutter.

The institute “has made a lasting impact in improving transfer policy and practice nationwide,” and “its research has informed how colleges and universities support transfer student success,” university officials said in a statement.

But “unfortunately, due to ongoing budget constraints and a realignment of institutional priorities, the university is no longer able to financially support the Institute,” the statement read. “We are proud of the Institute’s legacy and the many partnerships it has built, and we remain committed to serving transfer students through our academic programs and student success initiatives.”

Janet Marling, NISTS’s executive director, said that over the past year, institute staff tried but ultimately couldn’t find a new permanent home for their work—at least for now. She hopes that other organizations will carry on parts of the institute’s work, including its conferences and programs, and house its research and resources so transfer professionals can continue to benefit from them.

“We have heard, time and time again, there just isn’t anyone else providing the resources, the community, the networking, the translation of research to practice in the transfer sphere in the way that NISTS is doing it,” Marling said.

‘A Terrible Loss’

NISTS prides itself on taking a unique approach, connecting staff who span the transfer student experience—from admissions professionals to advisers to faculty members—in an effort to holistically improve transfer student success. Transfer practitioners and researchers worry NISTS’s closure will have ripple effects across the field.

Alexandra Logue, professor emerita at the CUNY Graduate Center, said the transfer process inherently involves multiple institutions working together, including, in some cases, across state lines; about a quarter of transfer students choose to go to a four-year college or university in another state.

Logue appreciated that NISTS conferences offered a rare “chance for people from all the different states in the country to come together” to coordinate and swap best practices. Such programs also allowed transfer researchers like her to share their findings with staff working directly with transfer students on campuses.

“The research that we do is pointless if it isn’t put into practice,” Logue said.

While other organizations are doing powerful work to improve transfer student outcomes, NISTS played a major role in bringing new visibility to transfer students’ needs by making them a singular focus, said Stephen Handel, a NISTS advisory board member.

The institute “added a legitimacy to a constituency of students that often got forgotten,” Handel said. “NISTS was completely focused on that constituency alone, and that’s what made it unique.”

Eileen Strempel, also on the advisory board, said she got involved with NISTS when she served as an administrator at Syracuse University and sought to create a strategic plan to improve transfer outcomes—an area she hadn’t done much work in before.

“I felt like, oh, wow, there’s a brain trust already for me, the neophyte, the learner who doesn’t know very much about transfer at all,” she said. She called the closure “a terrible loss.”

She said NISTS leaders often asked conference participants how many of them had never attended a convention focused on transfer students before; Each year, most hands went up.

“To me, what that moment always crystallized was the important role that NISTS had” in helping practitioners figure out “how they could learn from other colleagues, that they didn’t need to recreate the wheel,” Strempel said.

Those lessons have had downstream effects on students.

Each practitioner came out better equipped “to help hundreds, if not thousands of students,” Strempel said.

Marling said one of the most exciting parts of the work was seeing its impact on students across the country. For example, she watched graduates of NISTS’s post-master’s certificate program in transfer leadership and practice go on to make meaningful changes on their campuses, such as establishing new transfer partnerships with other institutions or revamping training for advisers to improve transfer students’ experiences.

She said she feels “profoundly sad” about NISTS shuttering at University of North Georgia, but she also believes NISTS will live on in some form because of the “tremendous outpouring of support and concern” that followed the announcement of its closure.

“I’m very hopeful that the spirit of NISTS will continue,” whether that’s as an institute elsewhere or “within the many, many transfer champions that are working in higher education across the country. I’m really excited to see how individuals and institutions take what they’ve learned from NISTS and continue to grow their focus on transfer students and continue to provide equitable opportunities for these students.”

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October 27, 2025
3 Arrests Made at University of Michigan Protest

The arrests were made on the campus in Ann Arbor on Wednesday evening.

Courtesy of the University of Michigan.

Three pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested on the University of Michigan campus Wednesday, MLive Media Group, a local news organization, reported.

The TAHRIR Coalition, a campus student group, led the protest in response to an event held by the university’s Students Supporting Israel chapter, which featured several Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Melissa Overton, the university’s deputy chief of public safety and security, told MLive that the individuals arrested were not affiliated with the university. She said the protesters blocked the exit to an underground parking garage and refused to move when ordered to.

They were charged with resisting and obstructing police, attempting to disarm an officer, disorderly conduct, and outstanding warrants, Overton said. The case has been forwarded to a prosecutor, she noted.

Erek Mirque, a member of TAHRIR, told MLive that the arrests came as a surprise and that he was unaware of any confrontation with officers before the arrests.

“We did not expect the situation to escalate the way that it did,” he said.

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October 27, 2025
Students Share Feelings of Belonging on Campuses

Seven in 10 college students say most or nearly all students on their college campus feel welcomed, valued and supported, according to a July 2025 survey by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab.

The data, collected from over 260 two- and four-year colleges across the country, paints a relatively rosy picture of students’ sentiments on campus this fall against the backdrop of free speech restrictions, tense protests and cutbacks to programs that serve students from racial minorities.

While respondents indicated the average student is welcome at their institution, they were less confident about whether they themselves fit in academically or socially.

Fewer than one-third of respondents said they have an “excellent” or “above average” sense of social belonging on campus; 42 percent reported “average” feelings of belonging. Additionally, 38 percent of students said they had an “excellent” or “above average” sense of academic fit at their institution, while just under half said they had an average sense of academic fit.

Survey data also pointed to positive sentiments about personal and academic inquiry. When asked how encouraged and supported they felt to explore different perspectives and challenge their beliefs, a majority of students indicated they feel “somewhat” (45 percent) or “very” supported (35 percent) on campus.

A Warm Welcome

Campus climate, or the perception of how much respect and inclusion students feel on campus, is tied to learning; research shows that students who face discrimination are less likely to succeed academically. Research has also found that students of color are less likely than their white peers to report feeling at home at college.

Inside Higher Ed’s Student Voice survey found minor variance among racial groups in reporting a generally positive campus climate. White students (75 percent) and Asian American or Pacific Islander students (73 percent) were most likely to indicate “most” or “nearly all” students are welcome on campus, compared to Hispanic (71 percent) or Black (68 percent) respondents. Seventy percent of “other” students, which Generation Lab classifies as students of two or more races or who come from outside the U.S., had positive reviews on campus climate.

Adult and two-year students were more likely to say nearly all students are welcome on campus (24 percent) than the average respondent (20 percent), which could reflect the diverse student bodies at two-year institutions and the preferences of adult learners to enroll in two-year or online institutions.

By comparison, students who had considered leaving college were less likely to say “most” or “nearly all” students are welcomed (64 percent) compared to all respondents (73 percent) or students who had never considered dropping out (77 percent).

Three percent of survey respondents wrote in other responses, indicating they completed their classes online and therefore could not speak to the campus climate.

Academic Success and Belonging

The survey also asked students to rank their own sense of social belonging and academic fit on a scale of poor to excellent.

Across racial demographics, Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) students were most likely to rate their social belonging as high (33 percent), followed by white and international students (30 percent each), Black students (25 percent), and Latinos (22 percent).

On academic fit, white students had the highest ratings; 43 percent of respondents said their fit was “excellent” or “above average,” followed by AAPI (42 percent), Black students (33 percent) and Latino students (30 percent).

Students who had considered leaving college were much more likely than their peers to report they had a “poor” sense of belonging (15 percent versus 6 percent).

First-generation students were more likely to rate their sense of academic fit and social belonging as “below average” or “poor” (17 percent and 37 percent, respectively) compared to their continuing-generation peers (13 percent and 28 percent).

DEI Cutbacks

Inside Higher Ed’s survey also asked students whether federal actions to limit diversity, equity and inclusion have impacted their experiences. The most popular response was “no real impact on my experience” (37 percent), and a handful of students wrote in that they anticipated greater impact after returning to campus this fall. This view held across racial groups, with the greatest share of respondents saying it hasn’t impacted their experience.

About 20 percent of students said the changes to DEI on campus have “somewhat negatively impacted my experience” and 16 percent indicated “I don’t feel impacted, but my peers have been negatively impacted.”

Nonbinary students were most likely to say it’s severely negatively impacting their experience (39 percent).

Ten percent of respondents said they are somewhat or significantly impacted in a positive manner by the changes.

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October 27, 2025
Fake News Brings Me to an Unusual Topic for this Blog – Teaching in Higher Ed
This post is one of many, related to my participation in Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

The topic for this lesson is fake news. Jarche instructs us that there are four primary types of fake news and he asks us to find an example of each type. I don’t normally post overtly political content here on my blog, but when it comes to the topic of fake news, it seemed easier to focus on politics than teaching and learning.

The closest I could come off the top of my head in my normal topics was the Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning podcast, and the many podcasts I’ve done about grading and assessment. But I’m still going to stick with politics for now. Stop reading if you aren’t prepared to read examples of the current US presidential administration lying.

Four Types of Fake News
1. Propaganda – Ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause.” – Merriam WebsterExample – Snopes shares 12 times AI generated or doctored content was shared by Trump or the White House. These examples seem to fit under propaganda, since they attempt to influencing people’s attitudes and beliefs. Though that also sounds like disinformation to me and I’m still not clear I know the difference.
2. Disinformation – “False information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.” – Merriam WebsterExample – Trump states that there is no inflation in the US. There are some who say that Trump’s specific type of lying falls under the category of bullshit, as defined by Harry Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit. Either way, it feels like shooting fish in a barrel to find examples of disinformation from this administration.
3. Conspiracy theory – “Persist for a long time even when there is no decisive evidence for them… Based on a variety of thinking patterns that are known to be unreliable tools for tracking reality.” – The Conspiracy Theory Handbook, by Lewandowski + CookExample – Ok. So this isn’t a genuine conspiracy, rather it was satirical from the start. But given how I feel after finding those examples of propaganda and disinformation, I needed a little break. The “birds aren’t real” satirical conspiracy scratches a certain itch for me, as someone who enjoys learning about birds.
4. Clickbait – “Text or a thumbnail that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow (“click”) that link and view, read, stream or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading… A defining characteristic of clickbait is misrepresentation in the enticement presented to the user to manipulate them to click onto a link.” – WikipediaExample – Bryan Tyler Cohen is rather notorious for using clickbait YouTube video titles on his main channel. I saw a video of him explaining that he knows they are frustrating to people, but that they really generate far more views, in his testing. He even created an alternate channel (Bryan Tyler Cohen News) with more toned down titles, which he suggests can be better to send to people who may be on a different side of the issues than him, politically.
My Muddiest Point

I’m having a hard time distinguishing between disinformation and propaganda. Jarche shared a quote from researcher Renée DiResta, who would prefer our focus be on the word propaganda, as it is more descriptive of the problem at hand.

El Pais: The problem is not misinformation

Q. Why do you prefer the word “propaganda” to “misinformation”?

A. Misinformation implies that the problem is one of facts, and it’s never been a problem of facts. It’s a problem of people wanting to receive information that makes them feel comfortable and happy. Anti-vaccine messages don’t appeal to facts, but to the identity of the recipient. They’re saying: “If you are a person on the right, you should not trust these vaccines.” It’s very much tied to political identity. Misinformation implies that if you were to say that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an absolute clown who knows absolutely nothing about vaccines or their relationship to autism, and that this has been researched to ad nauseam by scientists, if it were a problem of misinformation, you would assume that people would say, “Oh, here’s the accurate information, so I’m going to change my mind.” But that’s not the case. It’s a topic of identity, of beliefs, and that’s why propaganda is a more appropriate term.

But I’m still not entirely clear I can distinguish propaganda from disinformation at this time.

Handling Conspiracy Theories with Students

I have such a hard time navigating conspiracy theories with students who take business ethics with me. We have a whole section of the class where they learn how to use Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework to fact check the articles they read about business ethics related news stories throughout our semester together. I’ve found it is practically useless to ask them the question from Mike’s mini course about if they or someone they’re close to has ever believed in a conspiracy theory before.

There’s so much of one’s identity that gets wrapped up in what we believe. Generally, they don’t view these beliefs as conspiracies if they or their loved ones believe in them.
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October 27, 2025