Tag: opinion

Lessons of the Fountain Pen (opinion)

For the past two years, during the twilight of my academic career, I have become a devotee of the fountain pen, often pondering this seemingly retro act of putting pen to paper.

Composing again by hand forced me to admit how often I succumb to the internet’s never-ending temptations. In the past, some of my best prose has come forth at 40,000 feet, while I was strapped in for a long flight—with no contact outside the streaking metal tube. But the wily digital devil never rests. Most jets now offer Wi-Fi, enticing you to check your email or the Yankees–Red Sox score as you cross the North Atlantic.

My longing to write by hand, though, was undermined by largely illegible penmanship, a lifelong consequence of my naturally lefty self having been forced to write right-handed. No pen ever seemed to work for me, and I have tried most. Gel pens are the worst, producing a script that even I cannot decipher. Even so, during a research trip to Europe in fall 2022, where Wi-Fi was often unavailable, I found myself relying on a bound notebook during the day and my computer at night. The illegibility of my notes and journal entries made typing them out especially onerous and time-consuming, all the more so after I had returned home two months later. Then I remembered a fountain pen that my mother had gifted me so long ago—was it for my 50th birthday in 2005?—that its ink cartridges had dried up. A trip to Staples yielded a small pack, and I realized right away that there was enough friction between the nib and page to slow me down—enough for me to be able to decipher what I had written.

Like most brainstorms, this one proved ephemeral. To write by hand and then enter text into a computer—with my mediocre keyboarding skills—was just too burdensome. Those who started their academic journeys during the typewriter era will remember with a whiff of despair those late-night, hours-long sessions spent typing the final draft. Correction tape, erasable bond, Wite-Out—my heart sinks just listing those essential tools from another era. If you want a taste of those times, just sample the acknowledgments in academic books or dissertations from the decades before computers, in which women, typically wives, are thanked for having typed the manuscript. The acknowledgements from Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad, which I just pulled from a shelf, reflect more rarefied academic circumstances, as the author notes the grant provided by the English Department at Columbia University “for the typing of the manuscript.”

And then a light went off as I sat in my study, one that has changed my life as a writer. After struggling with incipient carpal tunnel syndrome a few years ago, I purchased voice recognition software. Dragon Naturally Speaking was powerful, especially if you spoke in complete phrases and sentences. My copy of the software is now old—it will not work with Windows 11—but proved a godsend with unexpected benefits. While dictating my notebook pages, I could hear the awkward sentences; I could conjure the better word on the spot, and I could detect those places where the tone needed adjusting. Sometimes inspiration would bless me and a new sentence or two would emerge like Athena.

I’m no neo-Luddite longing to smash all computers, even when Windows or MS Word betray me, as they so often do. I recognize the realities and benefits of our digital age. But wielding a fountain pen these past two years has prompted me to wonder whether some challenges the humanities face regarding writing and reading might be overcome by heeding the pen’s simple lessons.

The Importance of Touch

For millennia the act of writing has been tactile. From Babylonian cuneiform on clay tablets to elaborate Medieval script on vellum and modern calligraphy on heavyweight wedding stationery, writing has always meant touching the surface, with words being physically imprinted as the pen journeys across. When I write well, my hands seldom leave the page. And when I stop to consider the right word or a more felicitous phrase, my pen often poises a mere quarter inch above, ready to strike.

Compare this to composing on a laptop, where pauses can lead to disaster. Distractions fill your field of vision—apps, task bars, weather forecasts and seemingly never-ending notifications that another email has arrived or another appointment looms. When you grasp for the right combination of words, it’s all too easy to seek them beyond the screen, or, even worse, to succumb to the program suggesting what it believes should come next. And unless you are vigilant about shutting off endless features, the software will insist upon indicating that you just misspelled a word or used a questionable grammatical construction. Most of us then dutifully correct the “mistake,” only to lose the rhythm and even essence of our prose. More and more, the virtual page seems to be doing the writing.

The Value of Tangibility

We have all had the experience of composing and revising a document on a computer only to lose the effort because of a crash, a software freeze or a moment of forgetfulness in which we clicked “no” instead of “yes.” What might have seemed so real to us for an hour or more vanishes like a genie who returns to his bottle without granting our wish.

When I compose by hand, my efforts are right in front of me. The crossed-out word—which turns out to be the right one—can still be recovered. The history of moving paragraphs, those arrows and circles that sometimes fill the page, are not lost as they would be in computer drafting. Even more satisfyingly tangible for me, however, is the physical evidence of my labors: the blue ink stains on my right hand, the ritual of refilling my pen from the bottle when I have gushed out a pool of words, the celebratory occasion when I empty a bottle of ink and need to open a new one. A similar mood of celebration arises when I fill the last page of my wide-ruled notebook and place it on the shelf next to its predecessors. Scrolling through thousands of documents and folders on my computer is certainly a humbling experience, as they represent the literal steps in a multidecade academic journey, but I regret not having found my fountain pen niche many years before. What a collection those notebooks would’ve been.

The Pleasures of Portability

Coinciding with my return to compositional roots has been my regular presence at a place where my words seem to flow so easily, the Hall Street Bakery in Grand Rapids. During my sabbatical, I was there at least five days a week and now continue to show up on nonteaching days. All I need is my notebook, a folder with ideas or drafts, a full pen and my regular—a large house coffee and a cranberry-almond scone—to set me up for a solid hour of writing. Conversations bubble from nearby tables, kids run around hopped up on sugar, drivers retrieve DoorDash orders—all set against the occasional counterpoint of the hissing espresso machine—and I am in my element. No need for Wi-Fi passwords or the elusive table next to an electrical outlet. I can walk across the room to speak with someone, order a refill, visit the men’s room—all without fearing that my laptop will disappear. And spilling coffee on my notebook or dropping it onto the floor is a minor inconvenience, not an expensive technological catastrophe. Traveling light, I can sweep up my possessions in an instant and head out the door.

The Relevance to Reading

In thinking about writing as a physical act that produces something you can hold, I recognized anew how relevant these same qualities are to reading. We seem today to be awash in words, yet paradoxically find ourselves in the midst of a reading crisis that extends from the youngest learners to those at America’s universities.

An article by Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books,” convinced me that my experience with the fountain pen might be relevant to the challenges she describes.

Horowitch reports that students at elite colleges, who have already proven their ability to read complex texts, seem less and less able (or willing) to read long literary works. She mostly ascribes this to high schools emphasizing standardized tests, to teens distracted by smartphones and to college students who view their educations in strictly transactional terms, as means to specific, often exceedingly specific, ends—which seldom include pushing through Middlemarch.

She may be right, but the teachers and faculty she interviewed offer little beyond assigning shorter texts: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening instead of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye instead of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. A book or two at most from The Iliad or Paradise Lost.

Let me argue, though, that the very elements I associate with composing by hand—its tactile and tangible nature, its simple conveniences—should be drawn upon when encountering long, complex and sometimes life-changing texts. And that the cool distance of the digital interface works against these very qualities.

Yes, I know it is possible to put all your books on a single device where you can search and annotate the texts. Even if you lose your Kindle, your digital library can be retrieved from the cloud. Yet the experience of reading on the screen tends to flatten all writing, making each screen much like any other, so that the unique feel and heft of Moby-Dick, for example, is lost, making Melville’s incandescent prose indistinguishable from any Substacker’s, and probably less visually enticing.

Even if you can resist distraction on your laptop, you never get the sensory experience unique to each book: how it feels in your hands, how its page design pulls you in or pushes you away, how its very smell when brand-new or decades old can evoke its distinctive qualities, how the satisfying sound of turning pages reaches a crescendo when you get to the end and close the cover with a resonant thump. Like the angry slam of a telephone receiver, it’s a sound beyond our digital age. And it all leads to a final moment when you place the book on a shelf to stand as a tangible reminder of your ever-changing reading life—no internet connection required.

The physical book, that container that our society, try as it might, cannot cast into the electronic darkness, will live on. At least I hope so. A recent visit to my university’s beautiful library leaves much room for doubt. In the popular Mary Idema Pew Library Learning and Information Commons—sorry, but that’s its official name, sans commas—hundreds of students gather at any given time. But to stroll through its busy floors soon makes this book lover feel like Diogenes in search of an honest man. My lamp has seldom shined upon a student with a physical book in hand; instead, they tap and scroll their way through reading assignments in much the same way they engage daily life.

I see them as we share the bus that travels between our university’s two campuses, filling each moment with the small screens they find far more interesting than the passing world—the season’s first snowflakes, the glow cast upon the road as dusk approaches, the deer in a harvested cornfield who look up with more curiosity than my fellow travelers.

With a sigh—and nod to the deer—I open my copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, touching its familiar pages with my ink-stained hands, and try to remember to text my wife that I’m on my way.

After 37 years as a professor of English at Grand Valley State University, Rob Franciosi recently retired to devote his time to writing.

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May 16, 2025
The Contest Over Fairness in Higher Ed (opinion)

My 5-year-old recently told me it was unfair that her teacher makes her write from left to right “like everyone else.” She’s left-handed, and for her, it smudges the ink and feels awkward—while her right-handed friends have no problem. I affirmed her frustration. It is harder. But I also knew that was discomfort, not injustice.

If she told me her school never included stories with Black or Indian characters—her own identities—or skipped over Black history and Diwali while celebrating Halloween and Christmas, I’d respond differently. That’s not just about feelings. That’s curricular erasure—structural invisibility embedded in education.

Higher education is now facing a similar test of discernment. In recent weeks, the American Bar Association, under pressure from the Trump administration, suspended its DEI accreditation requirement for law schools. The University of Michigan shuttered its DEI programs. And Harvard University received a sweeping federal demand to dismantle its DEI programs, reorient admissions and hiring, and submit to ideological audits.

Harvard’s decision to reject the federal ultimatum—even at the cost of more than $2 billion in research funding—offers a rare but vital example of institutional clarity. Harvard said no to the false equivalence now dominating our public discourse: the notion that discomfort is the same as discrimination.

Critics claim that DEI efforts create an exclusionary climate and reflect a lack of “viewpoint diversity,” framing a commitment to racial equity as an ideological litmus test. But that framing ignores history, context and the actual purpose of DEI work, which at its best corrects for the unfairness of cumulative white advantages built into college admissions, curriculum and culture in higher education. It treats the discomfort that arises when racism is named as equivalent to structural exclusion. And then, under that pretense, the federal government now imposes its own litmus test—seeking to dismantle the very practices aimed at addressing structural harm.

Now that federal litmus test is extending into faculty hiring. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, under the Trump administration, has launched an investigation into whether Harvard’s hiring practices discriminate against white men and other traditionally overrepresented groups. Cloaked in the language of civil rights enforcement, the inquiry reflects a disturbing reversal: Efforts to address long-standing exclusion are being reframed as exclusion themselves. Rather than confronting the structural realities that have kept academia disproportionately white and male, this investigation uses claims of “reverse discrimination” to undermine the very mechanisms created to correct inequity. It’s a strategic misreading of fairness—one that turns tools of justice into instruments of suppression.

Similar to my daughter calling left-handed writing “unfair” because it invokes feelings of discomfort and victimization—despite the absence of structural exclusion—DEI’s powerful opponents manipulate the language of fairness to justify conformity and suppress interventions that respond to actual harm. “Race neutrality” is the legal fiction of our time, much like “separate but equal” was in another era. Both erase history in favor of surface-level parity and use the language of justice to obscure harm. We saw this logic in the Students for Fair Admissions ruling, which restricted race-conscious admissions. But as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent, the deep racial disparities we see today were “created in the distant past, but have indisputably been passed down to the present day.” The issue isn’t too much talk about race—it’s our refusal to hear it.

Now, under the guise of neutrality, institutions are being pressured to abandon DEI work, censor curricula and silence student voices. And many institutions are acting as if this call is guided by law. But the SFFA decision didn’t ban DEI programming or prohibit race-based affinity spaces, racial climate assessments or the consideration of lived racial experiences in admissions essays.

This is interpretive overreach: stretching legal decisions out of fear. In doing so, institutions compromise not only their policies, but their principles. But there’s another path—what I call interpretive reimagination. It’s the ethical clarity to meet ambiguity with purpose, not retreat. To respond not only as a matter of compliance, but of mission. And this discernment—the ability to differentiate between discomfort and structural harm—is at the heart of racial literacy. It means recognizing that not every claim of unfairness is equal and that treating them as such can perpetuate injustice. That discernment is essential for educators and institutions.

What we’re witnessing is not just a policy shift. It’s a redefinition of fairness—one that casts efforts to name inequality as divisive, while branding ideological control as “viewpoint diversity.” That redefinition is being enforced not just through rhetoric, but through decrees, audits and intimidation. Harvard’s refusal matters—not because the institution is perfect, but because it disrupted the pattern. It reminded us that higher education still has choices. The contrast with Michigan and the ABA is instructive. When institutions comply pre-emptively, they legitimize coercion. They don’t just narrow the space for justice—they help close it.

Fairness, equity and justice are not settled ideas. They are contested. And higher education is not outside that contest—it is a primary site of it. To meet this moment with integrity, we must refuse the fantasy of neutrality, name systems of advantage and commit to teaching truth, even when that truth is inconvenient. The difference—between choosing caution or courage—will depend on whether we, as educators, can practice the kind of discernment that parents are called to every day. Because, ultimately, this isn’t just about legal compliance or institutional risk. It’s about whether the stories we tell about fairness will include all of us—or only those already at the center.

Uma Mazyck Jayakumar is an associate professor of higher education and policy at the University of California, Riverside. She served as an expert witness in SFFA v. UNC, and her research was cited in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion to the Supreme Court’s landmark affirmative action case.

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May 15, 2025
So You Want to Be a Disrupter (opinion)

The need for higher education to be disrupted is felt everywhere. The demographic cliff, profound changes to financial models, emergence of artificial intelligence, the public’s loss of confidence and leadership challenges are all commonly cited reasons as to why business cannot continue as usual. Yet, there is usually little discussion of what disruption means and how it feels to actually do it.

Disruption is a fundamental change in the way an institution operates, ideally motivated by a desire to reposition in order to take advantage of future opportunities. It is inherently controversial because it changes the status and welfare of existing stakeholders in favor of others. If the politics were not so difficult, the reforms would likely have already been undertaken. Budget cuts, while sometimes necessary, are usually not disruption because they are often responsive to immediate shortfalls without reflecting a forward vision. The hiring freeze, one of the most common tactics when addressing fiscal challenges, is the very antithesis of the disruption ideal, because retaining those who happen to be employed at the moment and not bringing in new people only acts to preserve existing structures at the cost of change.

Higher education is not accustomed to disruption. Since World War II, colleges and universities in the United States have been in the enviable position of meeting most challenges by expansion—adding new faculty, departments, institutes and schools—because of enrollment growth, generous support from donors, government aid and the international standing of U.S. schools. Now, all that is under threat.

Like many administrators, I have been involved in many difficult decisions to deny tenure, institute layoffs and cut budgets. However, I have also had the opportunity to participate in two truly disruptive exercises from which I learned much.

In 2006–07, as provost of Miami University in Ohio, I helped lead the effort to abolish the School of Interdisciplinary Studies (SIS), have its faculty reassigned to other academic units, end its residential component and create a new academic unit in the College of Arts and Sciences. The SIS had been an excellent idea when established in the early 1970s, as interdisciplinary studies was relatively uncommon. However, by the mid-2000s, the need for research and teaching that breached traditional disciplinary barriers was widely understood, and there were ever-increasing examples at Miami and elsewhere. In addition, the age structure of the faculty meant that we would have needed to hire a significant number of new professors in a relatively underenrolled university division for it to remain viable.

The decision was certainly controversial, as we were bombarded by letters of outrage, faculty resolutions, seemingly endless hostile cartoons in the student newspaper and outbursts during ceremonies. During the years when the program was taught out, SIS students at graduation made sure they told me how little they thought of me as we shook hands on the platform.

As president of American Jewish University in Los Angeles—a position I just stepped down from after seven years—I helped lead the process in which we sold our Bel Air campus to a local school in 2024. The campus was situated in a beautiful neighborhood, but, especially after the pandemic, we were no longer hosting a residential undergraduate program, and our graduate programs had either gone online or could be better located in another part of Los Angeles. Rising property insurance, increased security costs and the prospect of having to expend significant funds on deferred maintenance propelled us to sell the campus so that we could use the university’s assets for better and more productive purposes.

This decision was also very controversial. The campus had been the site of the university for decades and many in the community had fond associations with it, even if they had not visited for many years. The original buyer was a private educational company, and there was dismay that we were not selling to another Jewish institution (although we eventually did when the first buyer pulled out). The local community was vociferous in its reaction to the initial sale, and many of our supporters, including major donors, were very critical of the decision.

It was hardly a surprise that I was the target of a significant amount of criticism given that I was the leading public proponent of both disruptions. University administrators may not like incessant public disparagement, but it comes with the job and the salary. Still, it was a considerable adjustment from my previous life as a professor. Many businesses prepare their leaders for conflict through very intentional professional development. Higher education does little to nothing to prepare leaders for the very real aggravations of public fights.

It is therefore important to have your own kitchen cabinet to not only get good advice and serve as a sounding board, but also to provide the necessary emotional support when things get difficult. Harry Truman said about Washington that if you want a friend, get a dog. However, on campuses and in communities, there will be wise people who are willing to be friendly advisers and will, in fact, appreciate being consulted.

I was surprised at the collateral damage. Faculty and board members who were proponents of the decisions also received threats and public criticism. I felt bad that allies who had stepped up because they also thought it was the right decision were hurt. I’m not sure that there was a way around it. Still, insulating, to the maximum extent possible, those helping to enable the disruption is not only the right thing to do, but critical to promoting further disruption in the future.

Others were afraid of becoming collateral damage. I remember asking one faculty member at Miami who expressed enthusiasm for our decision if he would support me in public. He replied that he, and many others, would not, even though they knew it was the right decision, because they did not want to antagonize their colleagues who were also their neighbors, fellow church members and parents on their kids’ Little League team. Administrators who are trained to believe that the most logical, best-supported argument will win the day have to recognize that the social bonds of the university community—one of an institution’s greatest strengths in most circumstances—will mean that they will have less support than they think they should have on the basis of who is right.

The communications challenges of disruptive change are also immense. In both instances, we thought that we had perfectly logical arguments about how to use scarce resources—faculty and money—in far better ways. We told ourselves and the world that this is exactly what universities should be doing. However, those who would be hurt, either directly or because their association with the school or campus would be cut, were enraged, and both easily identifiable and mobilizable.

In contrast, the “winners” were future students and faculty who did not even know what was being done on their behalf. A good communications strategy is critical, but you should be under no illusions: You may lose, or seemingly lose, the public battle, at least judged by the volume of complaints. It is critical to remember that the biggest process challenge in many disruptions is that the reforms are being done on behalf of those who at the moment have no voice. The public conversation should be evaluated accordingly.

In the end, governing boards make the final decision, and I was gratified that both my boards endorsed the disruptions I had helped engineer. Ensuring that the eventual deciders are fully informed of the logic of the proposal and are willing to face public opprobrium is absolutely critical. Trustees usually do not sign up for being central players in very public, fraught dramas where they are yelled at in public and insulted at parties and at their country club. A component of the attraction of being on a board is to be part of a bucolic academic community with which one has close personal ties. However, boards are demanding that colleges change, and trustees will have to understand that they will be in the fray during very public disputes.

Napoleon said, “If you start to take Vienna, take Vienna.” It is possible to win big fights even if you feel personally distraught at the abuse you have taken, if your friends and people you care about are battered, and if your very logical public arguments are dismissed. Higher education can overcome the challenges to disruption and we can engineer paths to much brighter futures. That is, in the end, what will save us.

Jeffrey Herbst is president emeritus at American Jewish University.

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May 13, 2025
Rurality Matters in Evaluating Transfer Outcomes (opinion)

Transfer enrollment rose by 4.4 percent this year, according to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In total, transfers have grown by 8 percent since 2020, signaling a steady rebound from the sharp declines seen during the pandemic. That’s encouraging news for students seeking affordable, flexible pathways to a degree, as well as for institutions focused on expanding access and supporting completion.

Less noticed, however, is just how much progress rural students are making. In fall 2023, rural community colleges experienced a 12.1 percent increase in students transferring to four-year institutions. This progress is even more impressive given the historic underinvestment in rural institutions and the well-documented barriers their students face on their path to a four-year degree.

Many of the country’s small, rural institutions remain on the margins of transfer conversations, partnerships and policy priorities. Here in California, for instance 60 percent of the community colleges with the lowest transfer rates are rural. From low-income students in Appalachia to Latino learners in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, rural colleges are lifelines for students facing barriers such as poverty, food and housing insecurity, and limited access to transportation and technology. Yet these institutions tend to lack the support, visibility and resources of larger community college systems. They often remain excluded from the design and implementation of transfer initiatives.

Rural students bring tremendous talent, drive and potential to higher education. Many are the first in their families to attend college. They are often deeply rooted in their communities and, in many cases, seek to use their education to give back and contribute to their local economies.

Transferring to a four-year institution can dramatically increase the lifetime earnings of these learners, expand their career paths and help meet the growing demand for a highly skilled workforce. Individuals with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, nearly 35 percent more per year than those with only an associate degree. Four-year degrees open doors to career advancement, civic engagement and personal growth.

Yet the systemic challenges rural community college students face—from more limited course offerings and degree options to long travel times to campuses to unreliable internet connections—require tailored support and intentional partnership. A one-size-fits-all approach to transfer doesn’t work when rural students are starting from a fundamentally different place than many of their peers.

For example, rural colleges may not have the staff capacity to manage complex articulation agreements or advocate for their students in statewide transfer initiatives. Their advisers may juggle many roles, serving as counselors, career coaches and transfer liaisons all at once. Meanwhile, students themselves may be unaware of transfer opportunities or discouraged by long distances to four-year campuses, especially when those pathways demand sacrifices they can’t afford to make.

The health of both our higher education ecosystem and our economy depends on ensuring that all students, regardless of ZIP code, can move easily between two-year and four-year institutions. If efforts to improve transfer overlook rural colleges, they risk deepening existing educational inequities and missing out on a significant segment of our nation’s talent pool.

Organizations such as the Rural Community College Alliance shine a needed spotlight on how to best collaborate with rural institutions across the country to improve transfer outcomes and better support rural students’ success. Progress starts with listening and taking the time to understand the unique strengths and challenges of rural communities rather than imposing outside solutions.

The policy landscape will need to evolve to support these efforts. This means increasing investment in rural higher education infrastructure, expanding funding for rural-serving institutions, and creating more flexible transfer frameworks that reflect the realities of rural learners, many of whom are working adults, members of the military, parents, or all of the above. Federal, state and higher education leaders should recognize rurality as a key lens through which to view improving student outcomes, on par with class or race.

Transfer rates are rising, and more students are finding affordable on-ramps to bachelor’s degrees. But this progress is incomplete unless it reaches every corner of the country, including the small towns and rural communities that are home to millions of students. In a moment when more students are finally moving forward, we can’t afford to leave these learners behind. When rural students succeed, our entire nation benefits.

Gerardo de los Santos is vice president for community college relations at National University.

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May 12, 2025
Why I Chose University of Florida, by Santa Ono (opinion)

The University of Florida is already one of the nation’s premier public universities. But it has the potential to be the very best. That belief—in UF’s momentum, its mission and its future—is what led me to pursue the extraordinary opportunity of the UF presidency.

Santa J. Ono was recently recommended as the sole finalist for the University of Florida presidency.

University of Florida

Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the chance to spend meaningful time with the university’s leadership. I believe deeply in their vision: ambitious, anchored in a culture of excellence and laser-focused on student success. The passion I’ve seen for this institution—including during my visit to campus earlier this week to meet its students, faculty and administrators—is infectious, and the alignment between the Board of Trustees, the Board of Governors, the governor and the Legislature is rare in higher education. This alignment signals seriousness of purpose, and it tells me that Florida is building something truly exceptional. I’m excited to be part of that.

I believe in Florida’s vision for higher education. I understand its priorities, and I support them. I will execute this vision with clarity, consistency and integrity. I put my name forward for this position because I agree with the state leadership’s vision and values for public higher education. My alignment is rooted in principles—like the renewed emphasis on merit, the strengthening of civics and foundational learning, and the belief that our universities should prepare students not just for careers, but for informed citizenship in a free society.

Public universities have a responsibility to remain grounded in academic excellence, intellectual diversity and student achievement. That means rejecting ideological capture, upholding the rule of law and creating a culture where rigorous thinking and open dialogue flourish. I share that commitment.

Like many, I supported what I believed to be the original intent of DEI — ensuring equal opportunity and fairness for every student. That’s something on which most everyone agrees. But over time, I saw how DEI became something else—more about ideology, division and bureaucracy, not student success. That’s why, as president of the University of Michigan, I made the decision to eliminate centralized DEI offices and redirect resources toward academic support and merit-based achievement. It wasn’t universally popular, but it was necessary. I stood by it—and I’ll bring that same clarity of purpose to UF.

The future of higher education depends on a clear mission, a culture of merit and accountability, and a deep commitment to preparing students to thrive in the real world. That means strengthening partnerships with businesses, supporting agriculture and innovation, and ensuring each student—regardless of background—has the opportunity to reach their full potential.

I also understand the challenges of leadership in today’s academic environment. During my tenure leading other public universities, I declined to politicize the institutions or publicly oppose national political figures. I did this because I believe universities must serve as platforms for learning, not partisanship or ideological activism.

Combating antisemitism has been a priority throughout my career. I’ve worked closely with Jewish students, faculty and community leaders to ensure that campuses are places of respect, safety and inclusion for all. I know that the University of Florida has been a national leader in this regard —setting a gold standard in standing firmly against antisemitism and hate. That standard will not change under my leadership. I will continue to ensure that UF is a place where Jewish students feel fully supported, and where all forms of hatred and discrimination are confronted clearly and without hesitation.

Finally, peaceful protest has a place in campus life. But the University of Florida is not a place for disruption, intimidation or lawlessness. If I am approved, UF will remain a campus where all students are safe, where differing views can be heard and where the rule of law is respected.

This is an exciting moment for Florida and for the University of Florida. I’m honored to be a part of it. And I’m ready to get to work.

Santa J. Ono has been recommended as the sole finalist to be the 14th president of the University of Florida. He formerly served as the president of the University of Michigan.

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May 8, 2025
Scholarship Thrives on Peripheral Vision (opinion)

The problem with scholarly focus is that it leads where you intend to go. And this is a problem because when you get there, you’re likely to find that your destination isn’t all that interesting. In practice, scholarship is not about effectively carrying out a plan but about exploring a terrain and developing the plan that is warranted by what you discover in that terrain.

This issue with the act of scholarship in particular is really just an extension of what we know about the act of writing in general. Namely, writing is not the process of explaining the argument that is embedded in your outline but instead the process of finding out what that argument should be. If your paper follows your outline from beginning to end, it’s clear that you haven’t learned anything in the course of writing that paper. You found what you were looking for rather than what was actually out there waiting to be found.

This reminds me of a question that my friend David Angus used to ask candidates for faculty positions at the University of Michigan College of Education: “Tell me about a time that your research forced you to give up an idea you really cared about.” If you discover something that upsets your thinking, that’s an indicator that you’re really learning something in the course of carrying out your study. This in turn suggests that the reader is likely to learn something from reading your paper on the subject, instead of just confirming a previous opinion.

Scholars need an intellectual starting place for a piece of research—an established conceptual framework that provides us with a promising angle of approach into a complex intellectual problem space. But the danger is getting trapped within the confines of the conceptual framework in a manner that predetermines the conclusions we reach. Instead, we need to be open to the possibility that our favored framework needs to adapt to the demands of the data we encounter. Perhaps we need to add an additional perspective to this framework or adapt or even discard parts of the framework that don’t seem to be validated by the data at hand. After all, getting things wrong and then correcting them in light of evidence is at the heart of the discipline we call science.

The need to open ourselves to perspectives that are beyond the scope of our established conceptual frameworks is what calls for us to deploy our peripheral vision. As I used to tell my students, the book you’re looking for may not be the one you need to read, which may be a few books down on the shelf. In this manner, scholarship becomes a process of continually evolving your conceptual framework over time, as each study nudges you in new directions. This is what can make academic pursuits so stimulating, as you bump into problems your current perspective can’t resolve and construct a new perspective that allows you to move forward in developing an argument. You can’t predict where you’re going to end up, but you’ll know that it’s going to be interesting—both for you and for your reader.

David Labaree is a professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Education. He blogs at davidlabaree.com and his recent books include Being a Scholar: Reflections on Doctoral Study, Scholarly Writing, and Academic Life (2023, Kindle Direct Publishing).

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May 8, 2025
Why First-Year Comp Classes Give Me Hope (opinion)

First-year composition courses, which are required of incoming students at many colleges and universities, lack cachet. No student gets excited about a comp class, and the faculty who teach these classes usually occupy the low rungs on the academic ladder. And right now, as crisis after crisis batters the country, and the world, first-year composition may seem even less important than usual. But in my 30 years of college teaching, it’s first-year comp classes that give me hope, because they offer the possibility of change.

These small, discussion-based classes give students much-needed practice in how to disagree without disrespect, and—if these classes were embedded more firmly into university curricula—they could radically reshape not only how students learn but how they participate in public life.

My students often come into their comp class with a chip on their shoulder: Why should they have to “learn to write”? They got themselves into college, after all, and if they get stuck on a writing assignment, there’s always ChatGPT. First-year writing is a waste of time, they think; they’re in college to take “real” classes, courses that matter.

I harbor a secret affection for these reluctant students, because I know that their resistance will melt when they discover the immensely practical importance of finding the right words for their ideas—and the accompanying sense of power that comes with being able to express themselves so that others understand them. Universities tell students that comp classes aren’t “content courses,” because writing courses aren’t discipline-specific. But then again, neither is the world we live in: Most of us live, work and think in multiple, overlapping contexts.

For many students, the composition class is the first (and for some, the only) place in college where they experience a seminar-style class that emphasizes process as much as (or more than) product. The paradigm of a composition course involves a reset: It’s not about “the right answer”; it’s about prioritizing curiosity over certainty and about students discovering not only that they have a voice, but that they can use this voice to explore their world. In the 21st-century university, in which faculty are asked for their “course deliverables,” as if learning were an assembly-line widget, comp classes exemplify an alternative to the sludgy tide of university corporatization.

Composition classes encourage questions, welcome mistakes and revisions, and value messiness and curiosity. During peer workshops, which are an integral part of these courses, I remind students that grades aren’t pie: Everyone can, conceivably, get an A in the course, so their workshop task is helping one another create more effective writing, not to tear each other’s drafts to shreds. Their success, in other words, does not depend on someone else’s failure.

There are other disciplines where students work iteratively and collaboratively—computer science, for example. But in composition workshops, students learn to ask the kinds of questions that promote reflection and refinement. They’re quick to pick up on one another’s sweeping generalizations—“throughout history, men and women have always disagreed”—and explain why those sorts of generalizations aren’t effective.

As they talk, they see how their own experiences might be radically different from those of the people reading their work, and they begin to understand how their experiences, consciously or not, have shaped how they see the world. In classroom conversations and workshops, they learn to disagree without rancor and to understand that how they chose to explain (or not explain) an idea has consequences for how they are understood. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, writes that college campuses “are places where dissenting views deserve an elevated degree of respectful and scholarly engagement.” That’s a tall order for U.S. colleges these days, it seems, but it’s one of the underlying principles of composition classrooms.

“How could I say this better?” is a question I hear writers ask, to which their readers reply, “What do you really want to say, and why?” Students ask one another to explain the evidence for their claims, to examine their assumptions and to think about alternative ways of presenting their ideas. Composition courses help people become more effective writers because they help people become better listeners: Students learn to disagree without dismissiveness or disrespect. And as they help one another, they see ways to improve their own work; it’s a feedback loop that helps them find critical distance, which is essential for revision. Quite literally, students have to re-see their ideas and consider the impact of those ideas on their audience.

I remember when a male student from Shanghai read an essay written by a female student from the Persian Gulf about her struggles to be a dutiful daughter. “She totally read my mind,” the Shanghai student proclaimed. “Being a good son, trying to keep my parents happy—it’s exhausting!” His comment prompted a class discussion about the generational struggles they all shared, albeit across wildly divergent cultural experiences. Their differences prompted questions that led to connections; difference became an opportunity for exploration rather than a threat. Students were excited to write the essays that emerged from this conversation; they were invested in examining their own experiences in order to open those experiences to others.

That’s what reading and writing can give us: moments of connection with other people’s lives, which then help us see ourselves in a new light. Connection and distance, empathy and self-reflection: These are the qualitative moves that students practice in composition class. These are the deliverables.

These deliverables, however, don’t translate into status for composition teachers, who are typically not tenure-track or tenured; they are often called lecturers rather than professors, despite having a Ph.D. Most of us are what’s known as contingent faculty because we work on renewable contracts (sometimes semester to semester, sometimes in longer increments).

To be a composition teacher, then, means working in the trenches of the university rather than its ivory towers. I’ve been teaching some version of first-year writing for more than 30 years, and while I might hope otherwise, I know that only one or two semesters of writing instruction isn’t enough to create lasting change, even though the most resistant students admit to feeling like more confident and competent writers by the end of the course.

If universities had the courage to put composition at the center of their missions, however, they could create real change: What if students had expository writing classes every year for four years, regardless of their majors? Four years of slow, reflective, process-based writing about the world outside their specific subjects, with an emphasis on exploration and curiosity, rather than “the right answer”? What if the ability to reflect and reconsider, the twinned abilities at the heart of critical thinking, were the deliverables that mattered?

Imagine those students bringing that training into the public sphere. People who are eager to ask questions and interrogate assumptions (including their own), people who think in terms of process rather than product: These are the basic tenets of almost any composition class and yet, increasingly, these attitudes seem almost radical. People trained in this way could re-shape public discourse so that it becomes conversation rather than a series of point-scoring contests.

First-year comp is a content course. We just need to see that content as valuable.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a clinical professor in liberal studies at New York University. She is author of The Necessity of Young Adult Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2023) and co-editor of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: American Fiction Since 1940 (Oxford, 2024).

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May 8, 2025
Could “Fear Equity” Revive Campus Free Speech? (opinion)

For most of the past decade, many professors lived in fear of challenging progressive beliefs on elite college campuses, beliefs that, as linguist John McWhorter argues, have often attained religious status. Saying the wrong word, or liking the wrong social media post, perhaps especially if one was a vocal member of an unfashionable minority, like Jews, could evoke ostracism from peers and even Twitter mobs demanding termination, followed by star chamber hearings led by unaccountable administrators.

This was an inevitable consequence of ever-expanding conceptualizations of what constituted “harm” and various -isms (racism, sexism, etc.). University mandates requiring investigations for accusations of “harm” or “bias” inevitably incentivized some progressives, who are overrepresented in academia, to weaponize bureaucratic procedures to denounce, demonize and punish those they saw as violating sacred values. Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, reports that more professors were terminated for speech “offenses” in 2014–2023 than in the entire McCarthy era.

The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey found that 14 percent of the approximately 5,000 respondents reported having been disciplined or threatened with discipline by their institutions for their teaching, research or other speech. If that response generalizes to the population of American faculty, it means there have been tens of thousands of such investigations (or threats) over the last 10 years.

The sense of fear was wildly inequitable, with far more conservatives than liberals reporting self-censoring. American universities suffered a decade of cancellations, terminations, harassment and even the odd death threat from the far left.

Fear Equity?

Now, thanks to the Trump administration’s—in our view questionable—policies regarding academia in general and elite institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities in particular, policies that many plausibly view as political vengeance for leftist activism, higher education is rapidly approaching fear equity: The presidential right has joined the campus left in using intimidation to punish those whose speech they dislike. Now, everybody in academia gets to be afraid of being canceled, or at least having their grants canceled. Noncitizen students and faculty also have to fear being deported for expressing views that the Trump administration opposes. Conservative and centrist academics still have good reasons to fear their colleagues and students, as they have since 2014, but now, progressive peers have similar reasons to fear whatever comes next out of Washington.

Is this an opportunity for free speech advocates? At first glance, it seems not. The solution to erosion of protections for heterodox free speech and academic freedom cannot possibly be vengeful restrictions on progressive speech. That is the road to expanding authoritarianism and eroding free speech environments for all, a tendency many current leaders in Washington would seemingly welcome.

Academia’s Failure to Protect Nonprogressive Speech

Nonetheless, academia’s record of restraining the censoriousness coming from within its ranks over the last decade has been abysmal. The American Association of University Professors, once a nonpartisan bulwark against censorship, jettisoned its principled support for free speech in focusing almost entirely on threats from the right while, in higher education, our (and AAUP’s) primary concern, most censorship came from the left. The AAUP’s recent statements endorsing the use of DEI criteria in hiring and promotions and the legitimacy of academic boycotts are seemingly designed to cement progressive orthodoxy over the professoriate.

In just months, President Trump has demonstrated the error of AAUP’s “free speech for me but not for thee” positions, as Nat Hentoff put it in his book of that title. Of course, it remains to be seen whether the AAUP will interpret this as “time to take principled stances for speech and academic freedom for all of our faculty” rather than “Trump is evil incarnate, so we should double down on imposing progressive politics.”

The last 10 years have been disastrous for free speech on campus. As Occidental College professor and Free Black Thought cofounder Jake Mackey recently wrote in “The last four years were the most repressive of my lifetime,” “It was fear of retaliation from the left, not from a fascist leader, that caused me to lay awake at night on more occasions than I can count, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancelation campaign against me.”

Polling data bear this out, as Sean Stevens and his coauthors report in “Ostrich Syndrome and Campus Free Expression,” a chapter in our co-edited book, The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025). Conservative professors are more than twice as likely as liberal peers to report self-censoring. This is a rational response to reports showing that, within academia, “cancellation” attacks—attempts to punish faculty for their speech—are more likely to come from their left than their right. Risking one’s livelihood is not usually worth it.

There is also evidence raising the possibility that support for censorship and for antisemitism was spread in part through shadowy foreign donations. A 2024 report, which one of us (Jussim) co-authored, found that universities underreported billions of dollars in funding from foreign sources (revealed after a Department of Education investigation). Worse, receipt of funding from authoritarian regimes and from member states of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation was statistically associated with deterioration of free speech and heightened antisemitism on campus.

Follow-up research in progress is examining the hypothesis that this foreign financial assistance helped organize anti-Israel student groups and whole academic departments. As Lukianoff reported in “How Cancel Culture Destroys Trust in Expertise” at the recent Censorship in the Sciences conference held at the University of Southern California, protests by such groups were almost “exclusively responsible” for disruptions of campus speakers in 2024, which he called “the worst year we know of in history for campus deplatforming.” (To its credit, FIRE protects the rights of both pro- and anti-Israel speakers.)

Notably, some campuses are far worse on free speech than others. A FIRE faculty survey released last December revealed that a remarkable 63 percent of Columbia faculty reported self-censoring at least occasionally; they identified the Israel-Hamas conflict as the most difficult issue to discuss on campus, with affirmative action second. That the far left has imposed a regime of denunciation and fear on many college campuses is beyond doubt.

Trump’s Attacks on Free Speech and Academic Freedom

But under President Trump, the right is making up for lost time. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut indirect costs on grants could be viewed as a genuine attempt to reduce wasted tax dollars. However, given that they have not reported any analysis of how indirects are used, many see this as a straightforward attack designed to cut academia down to size for its leftist politics. The administration has also disrupted the academic study of topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, prejudice, inequality and oppression by defunding almost every grant to study these important issues. While faculty are not entitled to federal grant dollars and the federal government has the legitimate right to set funding priorities, the Trump administration has also attempted to ban any funding on any topic from universities that have DEI programs that the administration believes engage in discrimination. These policies will chill academic discourse.

Furthermore, even if ultimately found to be legal (which we doubt), the Trump administration’s targeting for deportation of immigrants who have allegedly expressed support for Hamas further retards the robust exchange of ideas on campus. And these efforts are succeeding; the rapid capitulation of institutions such as Columbia to Trump’s demands has been dubbed “The Great Grovel” by Politico.

Toward the Rediscovery of Principled Defenses of Speech and Academic Freedom

Is it possible that the new fear equity, with both left and right afraid to speak their minds, may be a necessary precondition to pave the way for a free speech renaissance? There is historical precedent for this possibility. It would be a mirror image of the way that McCarthy-era repression set the stage for a raft of Supreme Court cases that dramatically strengthened legal protections for free speech. Yet judges cannot be everywhere and lawsuits cannot change culture.

Now that censorship is bipartisan, both the left and right have incentives to rediscover principled defenses of free speech, including for their opponents. As James Madison counseled in Federalist Paper No. 51, the best protection of freedom is self-interest, and now, on free speech, all sides have it. Alternatively, to take a more positive view centered on political education, it may take having one’s own speech threatened, or that of one’s allies, before one fully understands the value of constitutional protections of free speech and institutional protections of academic freedom.

An Action Agenda

What can be done to reinvigorate a culture of free and open inquiry, debate, and speech on America’s college campuses? Quite a lot. Last year, as reported here, House Republicans passed a horribly titled (“End Woke Higher Education Act”) but conceptually sound campus free speech bill prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation, protecting the rights of faith-based groups to determine their membership and assuring that speech limitations cannot be selectively enforced, as when conservative or pro-Israel speakers must pay “security fees” waived for liberal or pro-Palestine speakers. Just four Democrats voted yea and the then-Democratic Senate showed no interest. (In fairness to Senate Democrats, the House bill passed near the end of the congressional session.) Sponsor Burgess Owens, Republican of Utah, is expected to reintroduce the bill, and given Republican majorities in the House and Senate and Democrats’ newfound interest in free speech, its prospects for passing should be improved.

Yet federal legislation can never solve the whole problem. Norms and social practices matter more than law with respect to creating a free speech culture on campus. What can institutions of higher education do to strengthen an intellectual culture of freewheeling discourse, inquiry and debate? First, they can adopt a formal statement of their commitment to free speech and academic freedom, such as the Chicago principles or the Princeton principles.

Second, campuses can restrict the bureaucratic overreach of DEI bureaucracies and institutional review boards, both of which can and do threaten and erode faculty free expression. Third, the best way to limit overreach of existing bureaucratic units may sometimes be to create another bureaucratic unit explicitly designed to do so. An Office of Academic Freedom that is mandated to ensure faculty rights are not infringed by DEI units, IRBs, chairs, deans or anyone else, might go a long way toward protecting faculty.

We would prefer deep and principled commitments to free speech and academic freedom to be the font from which such reforms spring. But if the only way we will get reforms is through fear equity, we’ll take it.

Lee Jussim is a Distinguished Professor of psychology at Rutgers University and creator of the Unsafe Science Substack. Robert Maranto is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Together, they were among the co-editors of The Free Inquiry Papers (AEI Press, 2025) and among the co-founders of the Society for Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science.

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May 7, 2025
Confessions of a Reformed DEI Officer (opinion)

DEI is under fire—not just from politicians, but from within the academy itself. What began as a push for equity now faces an existential crisis. Faculty, students and even longtime advocates are questioning whether DEI has lost its way—whether it’s become too symbolic, too scripted or too powerless to make real change.

I spent five years as a DEI officer in higher education. I pushed for change in an academic system that claimed to want it. I still believe in DEI. Yet, I’ve seen how often it fails—not because the ideas are wrong, but because the execution is. Diversity, equity and inclusion, when thoughtfully and strategically embedded, can be transformative. But when they become symbolic gestures, checkbox exercises or top-down mandates imposed without trust or buy-in, they often backfire. I’ve seen both.

This isn’t a takedown. I write this because I still believe in the work—and because belief without scrutiny is dangerous. DEI doesn’t need to be dismantled. It needs to be reformed, strengthened and made more honest. We need fewer slogans and more substance. Less signaling and more systems. And above all, more humility about the complexity of this work.

One of the biggest problems I’ve seen is the reduction of diversity to only race, ethnicity or gender. These are important dimensions, but they’re not the whole picture. When diversity becomes a proxy for visible identity markers alone, we miss what actually makes institutions stronger: a wide range of lived experiences, skill sets and worldviews. Inclusion isn’t about agreement—it’s about making space for people who see the world differently. The danger of focusing too narrowly is that we create institutions that look diverse yet whose members still think the same—and that kind of monolith doesn’t solve complex problems. It makes us worse at solving them.

We live in a time of extraordinary complexity. Whether we’re addressing climate change, artificial intelligence, mental health or global conflict, these challenges require collaboration across differences. Research shows that diverse teams produce better results. They’re more creative, more innovative and more likely to challenge assumptions that would otherwise go untested. But it only works when inclusion is real—not performative. Diversity without inclusion is like assembling a symphony and never letting half the musicians play.

This is why we can’t afford to get DEI wrong. Because when we do, the consequences ripple out—not just in missed opportunities for innovation, but in eroded trust, disengagement and backlash. And some of that backlash, while politically weaponized in many cases, is also fueled by real problems with DEI itself.

We need to be honest about one of those problems: the silencing of dissenting views. When DEI is framed in a way that suggests there is only one acceptable perspective—or when people who raise legitimate critiques are dismissed as regressive—it undermines the very values of inclusion and dialogue. True equity work must make space for disagreement, especially when it’s respectful and grounded in a shared desire for improvement.

When critical questions are treated as threats, or when people fear professional consequences for expressing dissent, we risk undermining the values of intellectual rigor and inclusion that DEI is meant to uphold. It’s a short path from ideological clarity to rigidity, which can shut down the kind of dialogue that progress requires. Inclusion must mean inclusion of unpopular opinions, too. This is one lesson I learned the hard way.

Another challenge that continues to undermine trust in DEI efforts is the perception of the so-called diversity hire. The phrase is loaded, toxic and—when DEI is done badly—not entirely baseless. In institutions where hiring is reduced to checking demographic boxes, this perception takes hold. And with it, the person hired is immediately set up to fail. Not because they lack qualifications, but because their colleagues are convinced they were chosen for the wrong reasons. It erodes trust, breeds resentment and delegitimizes the entire process.

But that’s not what DEI is supposed to be. When done right, it broadens the search process. It doesn’t lower the bar. It means casting a wider net, doing targeted outreach and making sure the applicant pool reflects the full range of talent that exists. It means interrupting the biases that shape hiring—especially in homogeneous departments. And when you do that, the candidate pool becomes more diverse and more competitive.

During my time as DEI officer, we developed a faculty hiring tool kit to address these challenges. It supported broader outreach and inclusive job ads and helped search committees examine how bias can influence evaluations. The tool kit was adopted across the university and became the basis for a peer-reviewed publication. Search committees reported feeling more confident, and hiring outcomes began to reflect that intentionality. That’s what it looks like when DEI becomes a tool for excellence rather than a threat to it.

But even the best tools can’t fix a broken structure. Many DEI leaders are hired to drive change but denied the power or resources to do so. They’re tasked with transforming the institution but positioned on the margins of decision-making. And when change doesn’t come fast enough, they’re blamed. I’ve felt that pressure. And I’ve seen how it erodes trust—not just for those doing the work, but for the communities they’re meant to serve. If we’re serious about equity, we have to stop treating DEI as both a priority and an afterthought. It can’t be the institution’s conscience and its scapegoat at the same time.

The truth is that a DEI office or officer does not matter in the slightest. What matters is what these offices and individuals are empowered to do—and how the institution responds. Too often, DEI structures are set up with grand titles but little actual authority. They’re underfunded, overburdened and expected to carry the weight of transformation without the tools to do it. Worse, they’re sometimes used for symbolic signaling while real decisions happen elsewhere.

Here’s a hot take: Land acknowledgments are one of the clearest examples of symbolic DEI gone wrong. Even many DEI advocates are uneasy about saying this out loud—but it’s a conversation we need to have. Originally intended as respectful recognition of Indigenous peoples, they’ve too often become formulaic, superficial and devoid of follow-up. When institutions recite them without engaging Indigenous communities, investing in their successes or addressing systemic issues affecting them today, the gesture rings hollow. Sometimes it’s even counterproductive—giving the appearance of moral action without the substance. That’s the danger of symbolic DEI: It feels good in the moment, but it can do more harm than good by masking the real work that needs to be done. Respect requires more than words. It requires meaningful engagement, resource investment and sustained commitment.

Another hot take: Sometimes constraints make the work better. Guardrails—even legal ones—can force us to get more creative, more deliberate and more focused on what actually works. In my home state of California, DEI work has operated under the legal constraints of Proposition 209, passed in 1996, which prohibits public institutions from considering race, sex or ethnicity in admissions, hiring or contracting. In 2020, a ballot initiative to repeal Prop 209 failed—leaving the status quo intact, but reigniting debate about what equity should look like in a race-neutral legal landscape.

Rather than marking a shift, the 2020 vote reaffirmed the challenge California institutions have been navigating for nearly three decades. Public colleges and universities have spent years adapting—expanding outreach and pipeline programs, revamping search processes, and investing in mentorship and faculty development—all without using race-conscious criteria. Without relying on the most legally vulnerable tools, they were pushed to build models of reform that were legally sound, broadly applicable and less susceptible to political attack.

California is not alone—some other states have adopted similar restrictions. And while the state is not immune from the scrutiny and investigations now facing institutions across the country, the constraints of Prop 209 forced a more intentional and durable approach to equity—one that may offer useful lessons for others.

As backlash to DEI spreads—through lawsuits, legislation and public discourse—it’s easy to dismiss it all as reactionary. Sometimes it is. But sometimes it’s a response to real flaws: lack of transparency, ideological rigidity, symbolic efforts with no outcomes. The solution isn’t to abandon DEI. It’s to do it better. With more rigor, less theater. More results, fewer slogans. We need to distinguish between bad DEI and good DEI. Between what divides and what unifies. Between what placates and what transforms.

Here’s the reality: The alternatives to diversity, equity and inclusion—uniformity, inequity and exclusion—aren’t values any institution should embrace. Few people, even DEI skeptics, would argue otherwise. The real debate isn’t about the values themselves—it’s about how they’ve been implemented, and whether the methods we’ve used actually advance the outcomes we claim to care about. If DEI is to survive, it has to evolve. Not into something shinier or trendier—but into something real. Built on trust, not performance. And that trust won’t come from more committees or statements. It will come from showing our work, owning our mistakes and staying committed to the values that brought us into this field in the first place.

That’s what I’ve learned. And I’m still learning. But I haven’t lost hope. The ground is shifting—but that disruption brings opportunity. It’s fertile soil for building something better. If we bring more humility to our certainty, more evidence to our strategies and more courage to our conversations, this might not be the end of DEI. It could be the beginning of something stronger.

Michael A. Yassa is a professor of neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine. He served for five years as associate dean of diversity, equity and inclusion and continues to work on institutional reform and mentoring in higher education. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policies or positions of UC Irvine.

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May 5, 2025
Cultivating a Postdoc Community (opinion)
What happens when postdoctoral researchers feel like they truly belong? It is not just a feel-good moment—it is the foundation for success. A strong sense of community in the postdoctoral workplace can transform isolation into inclusion, stress into resilience and short-term survival into long-term thriving. It can help postdocs form the right mindset to face challenges such as career uncertainty, heavy workloads and relocation away from familiar support systems.

For postdocs, community combats a unique kind of professional isolation. Whether someone is fresh out of graduate school or pivoting from one career path to another, postdoctoral training is a time of both intense focus and high ambiguity. Demanding workloads, career uncertainty, immigration concerns and financial insecurity can weigh heavily on postdocs and increase their levels of stress and feelings of outsiderness, especially for those from historically underrepresented backgrounds. Because of this, for career practitioners, faculty and mentors, focusing solely on the professional development of postdocs no longer seems to be enough.

Why Community Matters

Looking to expand our support for postdocs beyond their professional development, we at the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis embraced the need to prioritize postdoc well-being and the creation of an inclusive, engaged community. We believe postdocs who feel a sense of belonging to a supportive environment are more likely to:
- Maintain a healthier work-life integration, leading to better research outcomes, productivity and professional growth.
- Reflect on their career paths, plan their future goals and make informed decisions about their careers.
- Develop transferable skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership, which are crucial for career success.
- Stay at their institutions, avoiding disruptions in research projects or the research group’s morale.
With these objectives in mind, the skill-development side of the postdoctoral experience needs to be complemented with considerations about postdoc well-being, sense of belonging and identification with the institution.

Initiatives to Cultivate Community

Building a strong postdoc community and a strong sense of belonging has to be intentional. At WashU, partnerships and a little imagination helped us develop creative, low-cost initiatives to cultivate community, initiatives that any institution could tailor to fit the needs of their postdocs.

Our community-building work centers on three main strategies: programming, fun giveaways and improved communication methods.

Programming: Moments that Matter

From our fall holiday pop-up to year-round celebrations of cultural heritage and history months, we have hosted events that offer postdocs essential touch points for connection outside their academic research and scholarship. We have reached out to internal and local partners (such as libraries and cultural organizations) and found they are often enthusiastic about collaborating with programs that align with their educational and service missions.

For example, we connected with campus health and wellness programs to offer existing services (like CPR certification, health screenings or nutrition workshops) branded as postdoc-only events. Likewise, during LGBT History Month, we hosted Walk with Pride, a walking tour highlighting a local neighborhood’s LGBT history, in collaboration with the local history museum, which donated items for a raffle. With low investment, these events provide postdocs with opportunities to engage with diverse communities and cultures, enriching their personal and professional lives.

Fun Giveaways: Small Tokens, Big Meaning

We regularly ask our on-campus partners for fliers and branded stationery, which we include in a welcome kit we give away during orientation. A welcome kit is a small bag containing a collection of practical campus resources and promotional merchandise from the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs and our partners. We found that elements like stickers and branded lanyards not only boosted morale but also became a way for postdocs to visibly identify other postdocs across campus, sparking lighthearted and spontaneous conversation. We have learned to not underestimate the power of a sticker that says, “I’m a WashU Postdoc. I got this.” These small tokens help postdocs feel valued and connected.

Communication: Making Sure No One Misses Out

To ensure postdocs actually know about our programming and services, we leveled up our communications strategy with calendar invites, personalized welcome emails and festive event announcements tied to specific holidays or cultural celebrations. A successful strategy for us has been to share our announcements with the administrative staff in the academic units—they replicate our event invites in their internal departmental communications and thus create another avenue for the information to reach postdocs. Partnerships for proactive, clear communication go a long way in making sure everyone feels included.

Call for Action

There is still so much more we are excited to build at WashU. We are developing a postdoc parent network, a postdoc alumni network and a mentor network. We are planning more cultural events that connect postdocs with their identities and local history. We are finding ways to better support postdocs’ financial well-being.

Community building is essential. We believe every postdoc deserves to feel like they belong, not just as researchers, but as people. And through practical initiatives like the ones we’ve shared, postdocs can develop a wide range of career skills that will serve them well in their future endeavors.

There is no need for huge budgets or massive teams if we rely on curiosity, willingness to listen and partnerships across the campus and community. Talk to your postdocs. Then try something small, fun and heartfelt. It could be a sticker or a bake-off. Maybe it could be just a well-timed welcome email that says, “We are glad you are here.”

The difference between isolation and engagement can start with a single gesture. That is a difference worth making. A supportive, connected postdoc community is not just a nice-to-have—it is a must-have for professional growth.

Elizabeth Eikmann is currently the assistant director of curricular innovation in the College of Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and previously served as program coordinator in WashU’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs. Paola Cépeda is the assistant vice chancellor for postdoctoral affairs at WashU. They are both members of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders. This article represents their views alone.
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May 5, 2025