Tag: opinion

  • College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    College English classrooms should be slow (opinion)

    In a minorly famous letter to the duchess of Sutherland, Henry James advises that The Ambassadors should be read “very easily and gently,” specifying that his correspondent should ideally “read five pages a day.” At this pace, the duchess would have taken almost exactly 13 weeks to finish the book if she read every day of the week. One imagines that the novel would be tucked into otherwise inaccessibly glamorous, luxurious days for the duchess, days filled with, among other comforts, corresponding with James about how to read his latest novel.

    Five pages a day is very slow reading, but most of us would love to approach our reading at a more leisurely pace, if not a pace determined so prescriptively. On the other side of the spectrum of reading experiences, one finds the average student in college English classes—both undergraduate and graduate. To use my experience as an example, I was at the nadir of my reading life as an undergraduate English major; as someone who naturally reads quite slowly, I spent many nights of my undergraduate career standing at my dresser so I wouldn’t fall asleep while reading. (I couldn’t afford, and doubt I had ever heard of, a standing desk at that point in my life, and my dresser was the tallest piece of furniture in my room.)

    While doing this, I often took notes blindly in a notebook with my right hand while I held whatever book I was reading in my left. I would reread my notes the next morning to help me remember what I had read the night before. I loved the books I was reading, and I wanted to succeed in the classes I took, but I was also, by trying to read upward of 500 pages a week, making myself miserable.

    I don’t blame the professors who assigned the reading—all of them were gifted pedagogues, and not all of them assigned too much reading. They, too, inhabited a culture in which they were expected to work quickly and fulfill numerous demanding institutional roles (years later, I still remember one of my undergraduate professors saying she worked around 70 hours a week).

    Now that I’m on the other side of the academic experience, however, I’ve come to realize that each of us is responsible for resisting a culture that is, by all accounts, making students anxious, depressed and—dare I say it—unproductive at unprecedented rates. Students in undergraduate classes are primed to work quickly. Almost every part of their life—their experience on social media, their online shopping, their use of ChatGPT to complete assignments and their selection of a route on Apple Maps—is designed to help them reach tangible and intangible destinations as quickly as possible. Most students, meanwhile, are terrible at working slowly.

    As academicians, we’re constricted, of course, by all the reasonable and unreasonable demands placed on us by work, family and the other important parts of life, and when we read—especially when we read for professional, critical purposes—we read and work as quickly as possible, that “possible” being an ever-nebulous boundary toward which we strain and suffer while still trying to produce quality work. As professors, if we read books like The Ambassadors, we’re likely to read them in bursts and chunks—butcherly words that sound as unappealing as the process of reading a dense, beautiful novel in such a manner actually is.

    While we cannot, in the immediate future, totally alter the institutional structures of postsecondary liberal arts education, there are still things that English professors can do to resist the pressure for speed. Chief among them is to design a classroom that encourages our students to go slow.

    In their 2016 book, The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber challenged the culture of speed in academia by advising faculty to work more slowly, a laudable goal, but one that critics pointed out was a luxury that untenured faculty simply couldn’t enjoy. The problem, of course, is that the people who design a job decide how much work ought to be accomplished in a given time frame, and untenured faculty have little control over the amount of work they are expected to produce to attain job security. However, what almost all professors, regardless of contract status, do have control over is how much work we require within a given time frame from the students we teach. In other words, we should design classes that treat our students in a way that we’d like our institutions to treat us.

    As English professors, our job is not to encourage quick thinking but to foster thorough, imaginative and critical thinking. To do this, we must design our courses to foster and prompt slow work that breaks students out of the habits of expediency they have developed throughout their time in school. Designing classes that foster intentional slowness takes effort, but it also means that we can craft the kinds of spaces that make literature enjoyable and show students the value and beauty of literary texts when they are encountered in an environment suitable for literary consumption.

    A slow classroom can take several forms. In the slow classes I’ve taught, it means requiring students to purchase paper copies of the texts we read and to keep a real, physical journal in which they respond to prompts weekly outside of class. I also do something in these classes that I wish someone had done for me when I was a student: I make it clear that they should spend a certain amount of time on work for my class outside the classroom but that they should also give themselves a cutoff time, especially when it comes to reading for class. I tell them that I take around two or three minutes to read a page of a novel well, sometimes more if the prose is dense, and that they should plan for each page of reading to take three to four minutes. I also tell them that if they make time to read and don’t finish, they shouldn’t panic; they should move on with their day and enjoy the nonacademic parts of their life.

    Most importantly, I assign less reading. Of course, I’d love to live in a world where my students have thoroughly read the English literary canon (whatever that means), but more than anything, I want them to have read something and to have read it well. To this end, I try to assign between 20 and 30 pages of reading per class meeting, which amounts to around 10 to 15 pages per day, not too far from James’s edict. Rather than just assigning this reading and hoping for the best, I explain to my students about why I assign this number of pages, talk to them about creating and choosing a time and space to read in their daily lives, and describe the process of reading in my class as one they should understand as a reprieve from the time-pressured demands of other courses.

    In class, I designate much of our time together as technology-free in order to make space for the rich and meaningful conversations that occur most fruitfully when we aren’t distracted by notifications from our phones and laptops. Students engage in small group and classwide discussions, and I challenge them with daily questions that push them out of their comfort zones. I task them with coming up with steel man arguments in support of cultural and fictional villains, I ask them to articulate what makes a good life by finding evidence for and theories of good lives in their reading, and I frequently make them dwell with a given scene until we’ve extracted every last bit of sense (and often a bit of senselessness) from it.

    We tackle around one question a day, if we’re lucky. But the answers and questions we walk away with are finer and fuller than the formulaic answers that students give when they’re in a hurry. In return for designing my class in a way that allows students to work slowly, I expect around the same amount of essayistic output in terms of page numbers, but I design essays to be completed slowly, too, by scaffolding the work and requiring creative responses to prompts to encourage the slow, critical thinking and writing that English professors long to read and rarely encounter. I’ve received work that was thoughtful and occasionally even beautiful, work that couldn’t have been written by AI.

    In many ways, my experience of earnestly trying to read around 500 pages of fiction a week as an undergraduate might seem anachronistic. Professors across disciplines have noted the apparent inability of students to engage with any extended reading, whether this means they’re not reading at all or that they just ask ChatGPT to do the “reading” for them. The irony of worrying—as many academics seem to be doing these days—that students will use artificial intelligence to read or write for them is that many undergraduate classes require students to work like machines, to read and write at a breakneck pace, a demand that prompts the ridiculous phenomenon of classes on speed reading, which many universities advertise and which are also available online (the one I’ve linked here is accompanied by the terrifying motto “Reading at the Speed of Thought™”).

    In a discipline for which the core method is close reading, the idea of students reading a novel as quickly as possible ought to make English professors shudder, and while it’s not necessary to dedicate an entire semester to a single novel, we ought to see course design as part of the solution to students rushing through their work. In an age that privileges fast work, near-constant availability and answers on demand, the slow English classroom is a reprieve, a space where deep, creative and inspired thought is given the time it needs to blossom.

    While our students will likely never occupy the rarefied spaces that the duchess of Sutherland enjoyed when James wrote to her in 1903, with our guidance and course design, they can experience the joy, power and, yes, the luxury of reading and writing slowly. We just have to give them the time.

    Luke Vines is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. He recently began serving as the assistant director for academic support at Berry College.

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  • Lawsuit slaps heart of academic freedom (opinion)

    Lawsuit slaps heart of academic freedom (opinion)

    A lawsuit filed in July against the Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, along with 20 other organizations and individuals, alleged that our public statements in support of antiwar and pro-Palestinian student protests last spring harmed other students by contributing to the campus shutdown that followed. Unraveling the cynical logic of this claim is for the courts. But what is clear from this lawsuit is that the purpose of such recourse to legal theater is not to ameliorate harm. It is to silence public and academic speech.

    This effort is part and parcel of a broader attack on higher education, one characterized by legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion; instruction; and tenure; and an epidemic of jawboning by public officials meddling into curricula, campus programming and even the careers of individual faculty members. Following a series of executive orders from President Donald Trump, colleges and universities across the country now find themselves in the crosshairs.

    The tactic used against us is what is known as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP). These suits are brought principally not to win in court but to harass and intimidate individuals or groups into curtailing speech. By entangling defendants in costly and invasive litigation—or even just threatening to do so—plaintiffs can frighten those with whom they disagree into silence. In the context of higher education, this comes at an incalculable cost.

    On its own, this lawsuit certainly threatens the speech of Columbia-AAUP. But in the current climate, it also opens a front in the widespread attack on universities as sanctuaries of critical inquiry and reasoned debate. In their mere filing, lawsuits like this one aim especially to chill dissenting speech, including speech that takes place at the intersection of the classroom and the public square. Such legal instruments are a dangerous cudgel that could be used to threaten broad swaths of political and academic speech on American campuses.

    Our chapter has precisely sought to combat this hostile environment in the speech over which we are being sued. In multiple public statements made during the height of the campus protests last spring, we condemned partisan congressional meddling in Columbia’s affairs, arguing that this “undermine[s] the traditions of shared governance and academic freedom.” We called for a vote of no confidence in university leadership, who we believe “failed utterly to defend faculty and students” and “colluded in political interference.” And we affirmed the Columbia Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ subsequent vote of no confidence in our then-president for her “failure to resist politically motivated attacks on higher education,” whereby she endangered students and undermined our rights as faculty.

    In challenging our statements in support of faculty and students, this particular SLAPP targets both our constitutionally protected public speech and our academic freedom. We are fortunate enough to be represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and civil rights firm Wang Hecker LLP, who have filed a motion to dismiss on our behalf that utilizes New York State’s anti-SLAPP law, one of the 35 state-level anti-SLAPP laws on the books across the United States. But the outcome of a SLAPP shouldn’t depend on your counsel, or the state in which you live. Unfortunately, for many faculty and students faced with a SLAPP, the only available option may well be to self-censor.

    Interests committed to the mainstream political consensus have found pro-Palestinian political advocacy on American campuses to be unacceptable. To silence dissent, they have shown themselves willing to use every instrument at their disposal in a manner that recalls the red scares of the early and mid-20th century, when character assassination and blacklists were employed in industry and civil society, including academia. This SLAPP revives such measures, as do the theatrical congressional grillings of college presidents, including our own, and the wave of censorship that has swept over higher education during the course of the past year. In this context, attacks on public speech are also attacks on academic freedom.

    Academic freedom depends essentially upon a social contract that remains under perpetual debate both inside and outside the academy. SLAPPs like this one aim at the very heart of that contract, which accords to academics relative autonomy to explore difficult and often uncomfortable truths on the assumption that those truths will ultimately benefit society. Although the classroom, the laboratory and the library are classic sites for the practice and protection of this freedom, the truths pursued there translate to worlds outside the campus gates. Bullying faculty and students into self-censorship in the public square, SLAPPs seek to further silence and constrain the pursuit of uncomfortable truths in the classroom.

    Scholarly knowledge consists of truth claims, not dicta. Whether exercised in the classroom or in the public square, academic freedom is therefore the freedom to make and to contest such claims. This goes for all sides in a debate, including the debates still quietly raging on our campuses. However, a stark reality disclosed by SLAPPs is that political force is now poised to govern the contest over truth in place of enlightened reason and democratic deliberation.

    If such high-minded concepts as truth claims, enlightened reason and democratic debate seem too lofty for the dirty realism of the day, it is important to remember that these still lie at the core of any academic freedom worthy of the name. Academic freedom is not a narrowly academic matter; it is a matter of determining whether something is or is not true. SLAPPs are designed to decide such questions in advance, in favor of those who can afford the attorneys, or on whose behalf politically motivated law firms work. It is time for us to exercise our freedoms and responsibilities as academics, in defense of our right and that of our students to speak.

    Reinhold Martin is president of the American Association of University Professors chapter at Columbia University, on whose behalf he wrote this piece, and a professor of architecture.

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  • Closing a college with dignity, part 1 (opinion)

    Closing a college with dignity, part 1 (opinion)

    Founded in 1957, Cabrini University, a small, tuition-driven Roman Catholic liberal arts institution located outside of Philadelphia, closed last June after providing a year’s notice of its impending closure. One of at least 14 nonprofit four-year colleges that announced closures in 2023, Cabrini announced a memorandum of understanding with Villanova University in June 2023, signed a definitive agreement in November 2023 and closed the transaction in June 2024.

    Through this transaction, Cabrini was afforded a final year of operation prior to closure. Villanova acquired Cabrini’s assets, including a 112-acre property, and committed to preserving the legacy of Cabrini through commitments like naming its new campus Villanova University Cabrini Campus, providing Cabrini representatives two seats on the Villanova board for up to two successive five-year terms, stewarding the Mother Cabrini special collections and planning events for Cabrini alumni.

    In this three-part essay, we—Cabrini’s former interim president, Helen Drinan, and former members of the academic leadership team—describe our decision to seek a strategic partner, the planning that went into a dignified closure and the ways we supported employees and students through a mission-driven plan to help them transition in terms of their careers and academic studies.

    It was a dignified closing for an institution that began the 2022–23 academic year facing significant obstacles to its survival. As the university welcomed a new interim president, Cabrini’s profile reflected five metrics used to identify rising pressure on nonprofit higher education institutions with fewer than 5,000 students.

    • High acceptance rate: It increased from 72 percent in 2018 to 79 percent in 2022.
    • Low yield on offers of admission: It declined from 17 percent in 2018 to 11 percent in 2022.
    • Falling enrollment: 29.3 percent decline between 2018 (2,283) and 2022 (1,613).
    • Rising institutional aid: Institutional aid awards increased by about 38 percent from 2018 to 2022 ($10,595 per student in 2018 to $14,638 per student in 2022), outpacing small increases in tuition. In 2022–23, 39 percent of Cabrini’s undergraduate students were receiving Pell Grants and 99 percent received institutional grant or scholarship aid.
    • Persistent operating losses: Eight years of operating losses from 2015 to 2022, ranging between $1.9 million and $10 million, topped off by a fiscal year 2023 budget awaiting approval that included its highest-ever multimillion-dollar operating loss.

    Enrollment and financial operating data of course tell only part of the story of a troubled institution. Many leadership decisions made over time cumulatively result in these kinds of outcomes. At least three common practices have emerged as critical leadership traps in higher education: nonstrategic launches of initiatives intended to increase revenues or decrease costs, consistent drawdowns of the endowment to cover annual losses and accumulation of deferred maintenance. All three of these institution-threatening practices were occurring at Cabrini over the eight years leading to the summer of 2022, when we realized time was running out.

    The Road to Closure

    Sound strategic planning for a tuition-dependent, modestly endowed, indebted institution like Cabrini depends on choosing opportunities that expand on existing expertise, require minimal capital outlays and are tested for success within a three-year time frame. At Cabrini, too many new initiatives, well beyond historic areas of expertise, were launched in the eight years prior to closure, resulting in a laundry list of only loosely related activities: a targeted international student recruitment program, graduate online education, revived adult degree completion offerings, new doctoral programs, a new residence hall and parking garage, efforts to qualify as a Hispanic-serving institution, and the start-up of a new undergraduate nursing program. All this occurred while the university took on additional debt for construction activity and used federal pandemic relief funding to fill revenue gaps, pushing the institution to the point where it faced its largest-ever annual deficit and rapidly declining cash on hand going into fiscal year 2023.

    In summer 2022, Cabrini’s Board of Trustees approved a four-month budget delay, and the senior leadership team sought to identify $10 million in revenue and expense improvements. In September, the senior leadership team presented the board with two alternative paths: 1) a plan to operate for three-plus years to assess the financial feasibility of staying independent or 2) a plan to find the best possible partner to help support the institution financially. Past strategies such as voluntary separation programs, involuntary separations and the hiring of external consultants all yielded unsuccessful results and negatively impacted employee morale. The best opportunities for maintaining independence involved growing revenues, reducing costs (with the understanding that previous attempts to do so were insufficient), capitalizing on real estate and seeking nontraditional revenue streams.

    The Penultimate Year

    Prior to the decision to close, while institutional leaders remained focused on staying viable, senior leadership offered an exclusive interview to The Philadelphia Inquirer in the spirit of transparency, announcing very aggressive organizational changes and plans for new programs and publicly expressing an interest in partnerships. Such an approach, we realized, would raise further questions about the future of the institution: The truth is that once an institution acknowledges difficulties, questions will proliferate, and it is best to be transparent and open when responding.

    As fall 2022 moved into winter, our leadership team became aware of three negative trends: 1) efforts to recruit the new first-year class were falling short of enrollment targets, 2) new program launches took longer than expected, creating a lag in new revenue, attributable in large part to reduced marketing resources, and 3) partnership conversations yielded few opportunities serious enough to pursue. Two institutions were seriously considering partnering with us, allowing for academic and possibly athletic continuity. However, in both cases, potential partner boards determined they were “unable to buy Cabrini’s problems” because of its declining cash and indebtedness.

    Given the direction of these conversations, we concluded that the institution was not financially viable. We determined that the best opportunity to preserve Cabrini’s legacy and ensure students, faculty and staff would experience a full academic year prior to closure was to readily agree to the MOU with Villanova, the initial step toward an asset purchase agreement and a graceful closure.

    Villanova’s strategic direction proved key to the partnership decision. Villanova’s strength as an Augustinian institution in the Catholic tradition aligned beautifully with Cabrini’s heritage, and the missions of both institutions made for wonderful integration opportunities in such areas as immigration, leadership and services for marginalized populations. Cabrini’s real estate offered the expansion opportunities Villanova desired in close proximity to its beautifully built-out campus. And Villanova’s financial resources enabled Cabrini to deliver a robust final year to all its students, faculty and staff, the value of which is beyond measure.

    The university graduated a senior class in May 2024, offered placements to every student interested in continuing their education and supported its workforce with a combination of job-seeking resources, retention payments and severance, none of which would have been possible without Villanova’s remarkable engagement. (Part 2 of this series provides further detail about Cabrini’s final year and transition planning.)

    Part of why we think the partnership worked was because we, as the institutional leadership team, effectively checked our egos at the door. We knew our focus had to be on what was best for the institution, not our own personal outcomes, to credibly lead the university through closure. A key lesson for other institutions exploring acquisitions or mergers is that the future expectations of the sitting president as well as of board members in a new organization should be clarified early in partner conversations; otherwise, personal expectations could present an obstacle to the transaction’s success.

    Another lesson for any struggling institution is to think critically about the kinds of partner institutions that would find you attractive, how much leverage you might have and how much you can do to minimize your downsides. This is not typically work you can do as you face the threat of immediate closure. For institutions that may be financially stable but are experiencing some of the indicators of risk and stress mentioned at the start of this essay, the task of thoughtfully identifying potential partners could be an important activity for trustees and senior leadership teams to pursue.

    Editor’s note: The second and third installments of the series will be published on the next two Wednesdays.

    Helen Drinan served as interim president of Cabrini University. Previously, she served as president of Simmons University.

    Michelle Filling-Brown is associate vice provost for integrated student experience and a teaching professor in the Department of English at Villanova University. She formerly served as chief academic officer/dean for academic affairs at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Richie Gebauer is dean of student success at Bryn Mawr College. He formerly served as assistant dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University.

    Erin McLaughlin is the interim dean of the College of Arts, Education and Humanities at DeSales University. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Business, Education and Professional Studies at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 16 years.

    Kimberly Boyd is assistant professor of biology and anatomy and physiology at Delaware County Community College. She formerly served as dean of retention and student success at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 25 years.

    Missy Terlecki is dean of the School of Professional and Applied Psychology at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine. She formerly served as associate dean for the School of Arts and Sciences at Cabrini University, where she also served as a faculty member for 19 years.

    Lynda Buzzard is associate vice president and controller at Villanova University. Previously, she served as the vice president of finance and administration at Cabrini University in its final year.

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  • Why are campuses quiet as democracy is in crisis? (opinion)

    Why are campuses quiet as democracy is in crisis? (opinion)

    A close friend who works at a nearby college asked me why, in 2025, there haven’t been student protests of the kind that we saw during the Vietnam War and after the killing of George Floyd.

    She questioned why campuses seem eerily quiescent as events in Washington, D.C., threaten values essential to the health of higher education, values like diversity, freedom of speech and a commitment to the greater good. We also wondered why most higher education leaders are choosing silence over speech.

    Deans and presidents seem more invested in strategizing about how to respond to executive orders and developing contingency plans to cope with funding cuts than in exerting moral leadership and mounting public criticism of attacks on democratic norms and higher education.

    My students have their own lists of preoccupations. Some are directly threatened and live in fear; some see nothing special about the present moment. “It is just more of the same,” one of them told me.

    And many faculty feel especially vulnerable because of who they are or what they teach. They, too, are staying on the sidelines.

    All of us may be tempted by what a student quoted by the Yale Daily News calls “a quiet acceptance and a quiet grief.” None of us may see a clear path forward; after all, the president won a plurality of the votes in November. How can we save democracy from and for the people themselves?

    I do not mean to judge the goodwill or integrity of anyone in our colleges and universities. There, as elsewhere, people are trying their best to figure out how to live and work under suddenly changed circumstances.

    No choice will be right for everyone, and we need empathy for those who decide to stay out of the fray. But if all of us stay on the sidelines, the collective silence of higher education at a time when democracy is in crisis will not be judged kindly when the history of our era is written.

    Let’s start by considering the role of college and university presidents in times of national crisis. In the past, some have seen themselves as leaders not just of their institutions but, like the clergy and presidents of philanthropic foundations, of civil society.

    Channeling Alexis de Tocqueville, Yale’s Jeffrey Sonnenfeld explains that “the voice of leaders in civil society help[s] certify truth,” creating “priceless ‘social capital’ or community trust.” He asks, “If college presidents get a pass, then why shouldn’t all institutional leaders in democratic society shirk their duties?”

    In the 1960s and ’70s, some prominent college presidents refused to take a pass. The University of Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh became a leading voice in the Black civil rights struggle. Amherst College president John William Ward not only spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War, he even undertook an act of civil disobedience to protest it.

    A half century earlier, another Amherst president, Alexander Meiklejohn, embraced the opportunity afforded by his position to speak to a nation trying to recover from World War I and figure out how to deal with mass immigration and the arrival of new ethnic groups.

    At a time of national turmoil, he asked Americans some hard questions: “Are we determined to exalt our culture, to make it sovereign over others, to keep them down, to have them in control? Or will we let our culture take its chance on equal terms … Which shall it be—an Anglo-Saxon aristocracy of culture or a Democracy?”

    Those questions have special resonance in the present moment.

    But, especially after Oct. 7, college presidents have embraced institutional neutrality on controversial social and political issues. That makes sense.

    Yet institutional neutrality does not mean they need to be silent “on the issues of the day when they are relevant to the core mission of our institutions,” to quote Wesleyan University president Michael S. Roth. And, as Sonnenfeld notes, even the University of Chicago’s justly famous 1967 Kalven report, which first urged institutional neutrality, “actually encouraged institutional voice to address situations which ‘threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.’”

    Do attacks on diversity, on international students and faculty, and on the rule of law and democracy itself “threaten the very mission of the university”? If they don’t, I do not know what would.

    As Wesleyan’s Roth reminds his colleagues, “College presidents are not just neutral bureaucrats or referees among competing protesters, faculty and donors.” Roth urges them to speak out.

    But, so far, few others have done so, preferring to keep a low profile.

    The silence of college leaders is matched by the absence of student protests on most of their campuses. Recall that in 2016, when President Trump was first elected, “On many campuses, protests exploded late into election night and lasted several days.”

    Nothing like that is occurring now, even as the Trump administration is carrying out mass deportations, threatening people who protest on college campuses, attacking DEI, calling for ethnic cleansing in Gaza, ending life-saving foreign aid programs and trampling the norms of constitutional democracy.

    Mass protests on campuses can be traced back to 1936, when, as Patricia Smith explains, “college students from coast to coast refused to attend classes to express their opposition to the rise of fascism in Europe and to advocate against the U.S. involvement in foreign wars.”

    They were followed by the University of California at Berkeley’s free speech movement in the 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, including those that occurred after fatal shootings of student protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard. There were anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s, and, more recently, students across the country organized protests against police brutality and racism after George Floyd’s death and against Israel’s military actions in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

    Though there have been small protests on a few college campuses, nothing like what occurred in response to those events has transpired in 2025.

    Students may have learned a bitter lesson from the crackdowns on protesters engaged in pro-Palestinian activism. And many of them are deeply disillusioned with our democratic institutions. They care more about social justice than preserving democracy and the rule of law.

    Students may not be following events in the nation’s capital or grasping the significance of those events and what they mean for them and their futures.

    It is the job of those of us who teach at colleges and universities to help them see what is happening. This is no time for business as usual. Our students need to understand why democracy matters and how their lives and the lives of their families will be changed if American democracy dies.

    Ultimately, we should remember that the costs of silence may be as great as the costs of speaking out.

    M. Gessen gets it right when they say, “A couple of weeks into Trump’s second term, it can feel as if we are already living in an irreversibly changed country.” Perhaps we are, but Gessen warns that there is worse to come: “Once an autocracy gains power, it will come for many of the people who quite rationally tried to safeguard themselves.”

    Gessen asks us to remember that “The autocracies of the 20th century relied on mass terror. Those of the 21st often don’t need to; their subjects comply willingly.”

    At present, college and university presidents, students and faculty must care about more than protecting ourselves and our institutions. We must speak out and bear witness to what Gessen describes and warn our fellow citizens against compliance.

    This will not be easy at a time when higher education has lost some luster in the public’s eyes. But we have no choice. We have to try.

    Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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  • Advice on cultivating an interdisciplinary mindset (opinion)

    Advice on cultivating an interdisciplinary mindset (opinion)

    Graduate students often begin their programs immediately after earning an undergraduate degree. Your excitement over a field—whether it was kindled by reading great books, paying attention to current events, the charisma of inspiring faculty members or attraction to the ideas presented in a course—gets you started on a career track that leads through graduate school. It may therefore feel a little late to start thinking about what you would like to do with your life midway through your graduate program. But in fact, it is an excellent time.

    People are attracted to research for many reasons, including a fascination with problem-solving, puzzles and ideas; a desire to change the future of some problem impacting the human condition; interest in creating and running a research team; or simply an attraction to Sciencia gratia scientiae—knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

    As a Ph.D. student, your research may be focused on the discovery of new principles, or you may focus on the application of existing ideas to solve practical problems. For example, you might focus on influencing policy around polyfactorial problems like poverty or climate impact, designing and testing public health interventions, or defining and implementing best practices in a given field or occupation.

    As you move through graduate school, the real-world problems you are most enthusiastic about may begin to feel out of reach. Research that focuses your thinking on application of existing knowledge to bigger-picture problems may leave you disappointed that you are not out on the frontiers, developing new knowledge. At the same time, your peers who have committed to studying the tiny details of an aspect of a problem may wish they could have more of a personal stake in solving its macroscopic elements, making human lives better and influencing policy makers’ decisions.

    Free Your Mind

    All this raises an intriguing question: How do you build yourself into a scholar who understands a problem at many levels, from atomic to planetary, from femtosecond to geological time scales? Is it even possible—or seemly—for a graduate student to try? Of course it is! You do not have to do every type of work that touches your interests, but it is rewarding to learn about how others are thinking about the things you think about.

    To understand this, try this exercise with your own work. What do we not know about your problem of interest? It does not matter if you work on malaria, Jane Austen or the root causes of poverty. The question works no matter where your interests lie. If you start jotting down answers to that question, you should be able to fill a page with unknowns in less time than it takes you to read this week’s “Carpe Careers” in Inside Higher Ed.

    Stow your list away for a while, for any duration from lunchtime to a month. Later, take it out and reconsider it. Make a page with three sections and separate the mysteries into:

    • Things that you don’t know but believe you can reason your way to a useful hypothesis about;
    • Things that you don’t know, but that are probably in your field’s literature;
    • Things that you don’t know and suspect nobody knows.

    All three of these are interesting lists. You should keep the first one close to you so that you can think about it often. Treat this list like a game. When you would otherwise be playing with your phone, pull out an interesting question and spend a few minutes thinking about how you might solve it, whether with an elegant experiment, brute force or clever analogy. It does not matter much whether you actually pursue any of the ideas that come from list one. Finding ways to solve problems is a core part of your graduate training. Building confidence that many different problems are within your scholarly grasp is invaluable.

    Take your second list to the library or a quiet corner and poke at your field’s literature, and then at the broader literature to see what other people have done. Be expansive as you look. If you work on, say, how vibrio bacteria sense the environment, you already keep up with the cholera literature. But what can you learn about how climate impacts the vibrios by looking for cholera in literature? How many novels have cholera as a plot element? When were they written and who was their audience? What does that literature tell you about who was affected by the disease, and where, and when, and why? What does history tell you about the times the books were written and the times that they portray? What was plumbing like in those times and places, or public sanitation? Do you have enough coffee to think deeper about your interests? Do you have enough time? It is well worth the effort, and helps you get to the fun part: list three.

    Enter the Matrix

    You do not have to be an expert in everything connected to your work. You can gain immeasurably more by becoming part of the vast interconnected thinking that surrounds us all. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,” says the poorly sourced refrigerator magnet quote. To develop traveling companions, develop connections with people who, like you, have interests connected to what you study.

    Promoting interdisciplinary research is important to those who take on complex problems ranging from climate change to human psychology. The logistics of stimulating interdisciplinary research are tough because different fields use different languages to describe problems that they may have in common. Those who think about connected ideas are often not only in different disciplines but in different places, whether that means in different colleges, schools and centers within a university or in different types of institutions beyond academe. Try to count the fields that are interested in poverty, from anthropology to architecture. Think of where people practice those fields: in universities, governments, civil society, international organizations, religious groups and more.

    As a graduate student, you may not have time to find all those whose insights might be valuable to you. But interdisciplinarity is increasingly important to academic institutions. Yours likely has a number of interdisciplinary centers. Find a list of them and take an afternoon to look them up. If there are several centers near you, it is likely that at least one crosses into your area of interest. Sign up for their Listserv and go to their seminars. Put the limits of your field and your position aside. You are not just a grad student or just a relatively new scholar in your discipline. You are a big thinker interested in big problems. Go forward as an equal and make some new connections. It might change your scholarly life.

    Victoria McGovern is the chief strategy officer of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a nonprofit funder with a mission to nurture a diverse group of leaders in biomedical sciences to improve human health through education and research. Victoria is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • An opportunity to reframe the DEI debate (opinion)

    An opportunity to reframe the DEI debate (opinion)

    The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a Dear Colleague letter on Friday that instructs college leaders to eliminate any campus activities that directly or indirectly treat students differentially on the basis of race. Others will rightly push back on the logic of the department’s stated justifications, the absurdity of its timing and the accuracy of its examples, but I want to suggest that campus leaders can also take this as an opportunity to enact real change on behalf of all students.

    This is a moment for campus leaders to reframe the terms of the current debate over the legitimacy of special diversity, equity and inclusion programs by doing the long-needed work of truly decentering whiteness as the normative identity and experience within so many campus curricula and co-curricular programs.

    If we are to truly serve our students regardless of race, and if—as the department’s letter states—we have to put an end to even the subtle ways racial preferences and privileges are attached to seemingly race-blind policies, then watch out. Most campuses have a lot of work to do, and much of it is not going to be to the liking of those who believe that it is DEI programs that make an otherwise level playing field an unfair one.

    What the Dear Colleague letter fails to mention is that the proliferation of DEI activities on campuses came about as a more or less conservative compromise position as the population grew more diverse and as students demanded greater access. In treating Black and other minoritized students as “special,” such programs meet the needs of these students in supplementary ways rather than by ensuring that the core curriculum and student life experience are equally useful, meaningful and available to all. If the department insists that we put an end to all DEI programming, then it will also have to support efforts to ensure that whiteness is not smuggled in as the norm or standard.

    Early in my teaching career, I saw the ways that DEI programs could be used to reinforce white centrality rather than challenge it. Student demands for a more representative and accurate curriculum were met with resistance by senior faculty uninterested in expanding their own spheres of knowledge. Special courses in “women’s history” or “Black studies” became the compromise position. Rather than revising the canon to reflect the needs of a curious student body, rather than incorporating new scholarship into the university’s core, rather than interrogating the biases and histories of the curriculum, new courses and departments were created while the original ones were left intact. This détente (you teach yours and I teach mine) became the model.

    Many of the special programs that the Dear Colleague letter seems to have in mind follow this pattern. They keep in place a curriculum and campus culture firmly centered around the interests and perspectives of white students while offering alternatives on the side. If compromise via DEI activities is no longer an option, then a better solution will have to be found. The diversity of the student body is a fact that will still require a reckoning. Decades of scholarship reveal the many ways whiteness is encoded in supposedly neutral policies and programs, and this will not be magically erased. For many colleges, achieving a campus where white students are not unintentionally given extra opportunities based on their race will require radical change.

    My guess is that the department knows this on some level. Otherwise, why is race rather than sex or religion targeted? A sex-neutral campus would have to do away with single-sex housing and sex-segregated sororities and fraternities. A religiously neutral campus could no longer privilege Christian holidays or values.

    We should absolutely fight against the many overt inaccuracies of the Dear Colleague letter. And we should fight against both overt and covert expressions of racism and white supremacy. But we need not fight on behalf of compromise solutions to the very real problems that inspired our current DEI campus environment. Instead, we can use this unexpected opportunity to pick up where we left off and ensure that every program, every aspect of the curriculum, every student service is designed with the needs of our very diverse student body in mind. We can stop treating the experiences and needs of white students as the default or the neutral.

    What would our institutions look like if normative whiteness were no longer at the center and the need for many of the special DEI alternatives were made moot? Let’s find out.

    Marjorie Hass is president of the Council of Independent Colleges.

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  • AI frees us to teach citation styles differently (opinion)

    AI frees us to teach citation styles differently (opinion)

    Receiving 15 student inquiries about citations in two weeks drives me to despair.

    The technicalities of citation style have emerged for students as a prime concern: Students require reassurance and instruction on where to put a period or a quotation mark, how to cite a quote within an interview within a book, or the amount of margin space appropriate for a heading.

    I do not blame them for their concern. I do blame the way we teach style guides, whether MLA or APA or Turabian or otherwise: as a collection of at-times maddeningly opaque rules that, to students, seem solely designed to satisfy the whims of the academy.

    But we don’t have to continue in this manner. AI can provide not only a way out, but also an opportunity to reconceptualize the way we teach citation style more generally.

    Defined by the Modern Language Association as “a set of standards for writing and documentation used by writers to find and evaluate information,” style guides promise consistency and structure, a coherent orientation to research. Yet as a general rule, students experience style as a practice of bewildering inconsistency.

    Consider in-text citations in MLA and American Psychological Association style. MLA citations follow an author-page format; APA follows author-date. Reference pages, headers and even title pages require different formatting between style systems. And even within a single style guide, new editions introduce iterative changes over time.

    For students switching citation styles between courses or even trying to remain within one style system, keeping track of the mechanics can prove frustrating. In the introduction to the APA seventh edition in 2019, students were encouraged to contact their institution or professor about which version of the style guide to use, with dual use of the sixth and seventh editions in place from 2019 through 2021. Students using RefWorks to create a bibliography can currently choose from among 15 bewildering versions of APA style and 10 for MLA—almost assuredly without fully understanding the iterative differences between each.

    Little wonder that the Purdue Online Writing Lab—that bastion of style sanity both for the beleaguered professoriate and overwhelmed students—remains one of the most-used educational sites in the world, with its citation style pages receiving the most visits. And yet in spite of this resource and a slew of others, including websites like Citation Machine that promise easy style formatting, students continue to struggle.

    In this milieu, style guides can begin to seem a bit silly. Inconsequential, even: an exercise in mechanics and parentheticals, or a game in which scholarship, as Aimée Morrison writes in Composition Studies, becomes perceived as nothing more valuable than “an error-free response to a prompt.”

    This is dangerous thinking.

    Academic integrity matters. Entering the scholarly conversation and attributing work properly matters. Style serves as more than a mechanical exercise. At its best, style facilitates a way of thinking and being in scholarship, supporting scholars to orient themselves within the broader academy.

    In a long-ago literature class that I taught at Ohio University, one of my students asked a question that has remained with me ever since: “What even is the MLA?”

    Having paid my substantive dues, both literal and figurative, to that organization for the bulk of my professional career, it never occurred to me that students might not know. But the majority of them were astonished to realize the MLA and the APA were actual organizations made of real human beings, with missions and philosophies informing the style rules that governed their essays.

    This revelation transformed the students’ relationship to citation style. They stopped focusing on the mechanical trivia and instead peppered me with questions, including one that opened up a week’s worth of class discussions: Why does APA focus on year of research while MLA focuses on author?

    That wasn’t the only inquiry. They wanted to know why Chicago used so many footnotes, how citation styles impacted readability, why MLA doesn’t require a title page and what these styles expressed about expectations in their field.

    In short: Everyone makes us cite our work, but on what principles do these expectations operate?

    The resulting discussions established an unexpected understanding among my students of how citation style should function and how all those seemingly random mechanics of various style systems actually emerge from deep, intentional thinking about research and the scholarly record. The practice of viewing citation style as a matter of scholarly identity and orientation, rather than as a series of mythological labors in the name of Real Scholarship, made a critical difference to their approach.

    I was pleased to see that my undergraduate students emerged from that term with far better papers. They cited their research well and with enthusiasm; they evaluated and integrated sources with mastery; their postpaper reflections evidenced a scholarly joy that I see all too rarely in the classroom. I had the sense that, for the first time, many of them understood why they were doing what they were doing.

    Yes, I still had to correct the periods in their parentheticals and the lack of italics in bibliographies at the end of the term. But that experience led me to realize that mechanics aren’t the critical aspects of style that students need to understand—and that AI can serve as a great remedy for these errors.

    If citation style is about more than arbitrary mechanics, if it is about more than jumping through grammatical and technical hoops to prove mastery, then allowing AI to pinch-hit frees students to shift their focus from granular details to the intricacies of evaluating sources, thinking through if and how to cite a work, and embedding their own research and voice in a broader scholarly tradition.

    Indeed, students already rely on websites and applications to mechanically format their bibliographic citations. An AI editor can surely serve as a similar supplement to adjust minor mechanics where needed: a period here, a missing parenthesis there, the addition or deletion of italics, indentations.

    This neither releases students from the burden of expertise nor opens a Pandora’s box of AI use. Gating AI use in this way emphasizes the value of the writing and revising process, as well as offering students the opportunity to engage AI as thoughtful scholars. As a benefit, students learn in a low-stakes way to engage AI thoughtfully, a critical skill in the workforce.

    Most importantly, students and professors with this safety net can breathe a little easier. Freed from the panic of formatting citations, students can focus on the issues that matter the most and polish a final project to a high standard. Revision transforms, too, from “a checklist of corrections that must be taken in” to useful, in-depth prompts that promote writing craft and deep inquiry. And faculty can offer high-quality feedback on content, tone and the scholarly approach rather than spend hours correcting the fine details of a bibliography.

    At their best, style guides serve as a reflection of scholarly value. To write in APA style, MLA or Chicago, or even the dreaded “house style” used by some journals or publications, makes a statement about what a discipline or a publication prioritizes: what they deem worthy of inclusion or neglect, what constitutes readability and what matters to the academic record.

    To focus only on minutiae runs the risk of dismissing those rich and complex concepts. Better by far to invite students into this academic conversation, elaborating on the distinctions and philosophies of practice inherent in the way we cite literature, than to represent citation style as an arbitrary practice of rote and meaningless work. AI can expedite this process and facilitate this work in a way that is of great value both to students and to faculty.

    So please, bookmark the Purdue Owl website. Dog-ear the relevant pages in the necessary handbook or style guide of choice. Feel free to inculcate a style pet peeve, or to long for the earlier style guide edition now lost to time. But if institutional approach permits, take advantage of the relative freedom that AI can offer to break away from the granular focus on details to a broader and more integrated view of how and why citation style matters—even, and especially, when we can’t remember where the period goes.

    Brandy Bagar-Fraley is program chair for the master of science in advanced professional studies program and doctoral lead faculty at Franklin University, where she oversees doctoral writing courses. She serves as a member of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession, and her current research seeks to integrate student perceptions of generative AI into AI-focused pedagogy and departmental approaches.

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  • Essay on the play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (opinion)

    Essay on the play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” (opinion)

    A brief announcement: After 20 years of writing “Intellectual Affairs” for Inside Higher Ed, I am retiring at the end of the month—from the gig, that is, not from writing itself. The final column will run in two weeks.

    Going to a play at the height of COVID-19 was effectively impossible, but I managed to see two productions of Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning in the fall of 2020. The first performance was via Zoom. The actors did what they could, but the suspension of disbelief was never a viewer option. Heroes was then produced by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater and “captured digitally as a site-specific production, created in a closed quarantine ‘bubble’ at a private location in the Poconos, following strict health guidelines,” as press materials stated at the time.

    Set at a small Catholic college in rural Wyoming during the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Heroes centers on four friends (two men, two women) who reunite at a college function, a few years after graduation. They all admire a professor who has been appointed as president of the college. She joins them around two-thirds of the way through the play; one of the four is her daughter.

    The audience quickly picks up that Transfiguration College of Wyoming has a curriculum based on the Great Books, with a strong dose of conservative theology—not least on matters of sexual morality. And the lessons have gone deep. None of the four has drifted away from the faith, or skewed to the left, although one is clearly more troubled by punitive rhetoric than the rest.

    The play’s title alludes to a pop-sociological theory of history as moving through a cycle of four periods, each about two decades long. Since graduation, one member of the group has become a fairly successful figure in right-wing media (likely she has Steve Bannon on speed dial) and an ardent believer in the apocalypse promised by the fourth turning.

    “It’s destruction,” she says. “It’s revolution, it’s war. The nation almost doesn’t survive. Great example is the Civil War, and the economic crisis before that. Or the Great Depression and World War II. And it’s right now. The national identity crisis caused by Obama. Liberals think it’s Trump. It’s the fight to save civilization. People start to collectivize and turn against each other. It seems like everything’s ending—we’re all gonna die. No one trusts each other. But the people who do trust each other form crazy bonds. Somehow we get through it, we rise from the ashes …”

    The phoenix that emerges? An era of security, conformity and prosperity. The apocalypse has a happy ending.

    When the play premiered off-Broadway in 2019, reviewers often imagined the discomfort it would presumably give New York theatergoers—plunged into a continuous flow of red state ideology, with no character challenging it. But the play did more than that. The figures Arbery puts on stage are characters, not ventriloquist dummies. They have known one another at close proximity for years and formed “crazy bonds” of great intensity.

    Their conversation is rooted in that personal history as well as in Transfiguration College’s carefully tended vision of Judeo-Christian Western civilization. The playwright creates a good deal of inner space for the actors to occupy and move around in. When I finally got to see Heroes of the Fourth Turning onstage, in person, there were moments that felt like eavesdropping on real people.

    What comes out of a character’s mouth at times echoes well-worn culture-war talking points—many unchanged now, almost eight years after when the play is set. At the same time, the characters clash over points of doctrine and ethical disagreement, and express very mixed feelings about the MAGA crusade. The closest thing to an expression of enthusiasm for the new president (then and now) is when a character calls Trump “a Golem molded from the clay of mass media … Even if he himself is confused, he has the ability to spit out digestible sound bites rooted in decades of the work of the most brilliant conservative think tanks in the country.”

    This is cynical, but also naïve. When the president of the college appears before her adoring former students, she recites some points they have undoubtedly heard from her many times:

    “Progressivism moves too fast and forces change and constricts liberty. Gridlock is beautiful. In the delay is deliberation and true consensus. If you just railroad something through because you want it done, that’s the passion of the mob. Delaying is the structure of the [republic], which is structured differently in order to offset the dangers of democracy. I believe in slowness, gridlock.”

    She’s a fictional character, but I still wonder what she’s made of the last few weeks.

    Not long after Heroes opened in 2019, Elizabeth Redden wrote an in-depth article for Inside Higher Ed about Wyoming Catholic College, the not-so-veiled original for the play’s Transfiguration College. Arbery’s father was the college’s president at the time. All of which goes some ways toward explaining how a one-act play can evoke so palpably a college that is also a counterculture.

    Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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  • Why the NIH cuts are so wrong (opinion)

    Why the NIH cuts are so wrong (opinion)

    Indirect cost recovery (ICR) seems like a boring, technical budget subject. In reality, it is a major source of the long-running budget crises at public research universities. Misinformation about ICR has also confused everyone about the university’s public benefits.

    These paired problems—concealed budget shortfalls and misinformation—didn’t cause the ICR cuts being implemented by the NIH acting director, one Matthew J. Memoli, M.D. But they are the basis of Memoli’s rationale.

    Trump’s people will sustain these cuts unless academics can create an honest counternarrative that inspires wider opposition. I’ll sketch a counternarrative below.

    The sudden policy change is that the NIH is to cap indirect cost recovery at 15 percent of the direct costs of a grant, regardless of the existing negotiated rate. Multiple lawsuits have been filed challenging the legality of the change, and courts have temporarily blocked it from going into effect.

    Memoli’s notice of the cap, issued Friday, has a narrative that is wrong but internally coherent and plausible.

    It starts with three claims about the $9 billion of the overall $35 billion research funding budget that goes to indirect costs:

    • Indirect cost allocations are in zero-sum competition with direct costs, therefore reducing the total amount of research.
    • Indirect costs are “difficult for NIH to oversee” because they aren’t entirely entailed by a specific grant.
    • “Private foundations” cap overhead charges at 10 to 15 percent of direct costs and all but a handful of universities accept those grants.

    Memoli offers a solution: Define a “market rate” for indirect costs as that allowed by private foundations (Gates, Chan Zuckerberg, some others). The implication is the foundations’ rate captures real indirect costs rather than inflated or wishful costs that universities skim to pad out bloated administrations. On this analytical basis, currently wasted indirect costs will be reallocated to useful direct costs, thus increasing rather than decreasing scientific research.

    There’s a false logic here that needs to be confronted.

    The strategy so far to resist these cuts seems to focus on outcomes rather than on the actual claims or the underlying budgetary reality of STEM research in the United States. Scientific groups have called the ICR rate cap an attack on U.S. scientific leadership and on public benefits to U.S. taxpayers (childhood cancer treatments that will save lives, etc.). This is all important to talk about. And yet these claims don’t refute the NIH logic. Nor do they get at the hidden budget reality of academic science.

    On the logic: Indirect costs aren’t in competition with direct costs because direct and indirect costs pay for different categories of research ingredients.

    Direct costs apply to the individual grant: costs for chemicals, graduate student labor, equipment, etc., that are only consumed by that particular grant.

    Indirect costs, also called facilities and administrative (F&A) costs, support infrastructure used by everybody in a department, discipline, division, school or university. Infrastructure is the library that spends tens of thousands of dollars a year to subscribe to just one important journal that is consulted by hundreds or thousands of members of that campus community annually. Infrastructure is the accounting staff that writes budgets for dozens and dozens of grant applications across departments or schools. Infrastructure is the building, new or old, that houses multiple laboratories: If it’s new, the campus is still paying it off; if it’s old, the campus is spending lots of money keeping it running. These things are the tip of the iceberg of the indirect costs of contemporary STEM research.

    In response to the NIH’s social media announcement of its indirect costs rate cut, Bertha Madras had a good starter list of what indirects involve.

    Screenshot via Christopher Newfield

    And there are also people who track all these materials, reorder them, run the daily accounting, etc.—honestly, people who aren’t directly involved in STEM research have a very hard time grasping its size and complexity, and therefore its cost.

    As part of refuting the claim that NIH can just not pay for all this and therefore pay for more research, the black box of research needs to be opened up, Bertha Madras–style, and properly narrated as a collaborative (and exciting) activity.

    This matter of human activity gets us to the second NIH-Memoli claim, which involves toting up the processes, structures, systems and people that make up research infrastructure and adding up their costs. The alleged problem is that it is “difficult to oversee.”

    Very true, but difficult things can and often must be done, and that is what happens with indirect costs. Every university compiles indirect costs as a condition of receiving research grants. Specialized staff (more indirect costs!) use a large amount of accounting data to sum up these costs, and they use expensive information technology to do this to the correct standard. University staff then negotiate with federal agencies for a rate that addresses their particular university’s actual indirect costs. These rates are set for a time, then renegotiated at regular intervals to reflect changing costs or infrastructural needs.

    The fact that this process is “difficult” doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with it. This claim shouldn’t stand—unless and until NIH convincingly identifies specific flaws.

    As stated, the NIH-Memoli claim that decreasing funding for overhead cuts will increase science is easily falsifiable. (And we can say this while still advocating for reducing overhead costs, including ever-rising compliance costs imposed by federal research agencies. But we would do this by reducing the mandated costs, not the cap.)

    The third statement—that private foundations allow only 10 to 15 percent rates of indirect cost recovery—doesn’t mean anything in itself. Perhaps Gates et al. have the definitive analysis of true indirect costs that they have yet to share with humanity. Perhaps Gates et al. believe that the federal taxpayer should fund the university infrastructure that they are entitled to use at a massive discount. Perhaps Gates et al. use their wealth and prestige to leverage a better deal for themselves at the expense of the university just because they can. Which of these interpretations is correct? NIH-Memoli assume the first but don’t actually show that the private foundation rate is the true rate. (In reality, the second explanation is the best.)

    This kind of critique is worth doing, and it can be expanded. The NIH view reflects right-wing public-choice economics that treat teachers, scientists et al. as simple gain maximizers producing private, not public goods. This means that their negotiations with federal agencies will reflect their self-interest, while in contrast the “market rate” is objectively valid. We do need to address these false premises and bad conclusions again and again, whenever they arise.

    However, this critique is only half the story. The other half is the budget reality of large losses on sponsored research, all incurred as a public service to knowledge and society.

    Take that NIH image above. It makes no logical sense to put the endowments of three very untypical universities next to their ICR rates: They aren’t connected. It makes political narrative sense, however: The narrative is that fat-cat universities are making a profit on research at regular taxpayers’ expense, and getting even fatter.

    The only way to deal with this very effective, very entrenched Republican story is to come clean on the losses that universities incur. The reality is that existing rates of indirect cost recovery do not cover actual indirect costs, but require subsidy from the university that performs the research. ICR is not icing on the budget cake that universities can do without. ICR buys only a portion of the indirect costs cake, and the rest is purchased by each university’s own institutional funds.

    For example, here are the top 16 university recipients of federal research funds. One of the largest in terms of NIH funding (through the Department of Health and Human Services) is the University of California, San Francisco, winning $795.6 million in grants in fiscal year 2023. (The National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey tables for fiscal year 2023 are here.)

    table visualization

    UCSF’s negotiated indirect cost recovery rate is 64 percent. This means that it has shown HHS and other agencies detailed evidence that it has real indirect costs in something like this amount (more on “something like” in a minute). It means that HHS et al. have accepted UCSF’s evidence of their real indirect costs as valid.

    If the total of UCSF’s HHS $795.6 million is received with a 64 percent ICR rate, this means that every $1.64 of grant funds has $0.64 in indirect funds and one dollar in direct. The math estimates that UCSF receives about $310 million of its HHS funds in the form of ICR.

    Now, the new NIH directive cuts UCSF from 64 percent to 15 percent. That’s a reduction of about 77 percent. Reduce $310 million by that proportion and you have UCSF losing about $238 million in one fell swoop. There’s no mechanism in the directive for shifting that into the direct costs of UCSF grants, so let’s assume a full loss of $238 million.

    In Memoli’s narrative, this $238 million is the Reaganite’s “waste, fraud and abuse.” The remaining approximately $71 million is legitimate overhead as measured (wrongly) by what Gates et al. have managed to force universities to accept in exchange for the funding of their researchers’ direct costs.

    But the actual situation is even worse than this. It’s not that UCSF now will lose $238 million on their NIH research. In reality, even at (allegedly fat-cat) 64 percent ICR rates, they were already losing tons of money. Here’s another table from the HERD survey.

    table visualization

    There’s UCSF in the No. 2 national position, a major research powerhouse. It spends more than $2 billion a year on research. However, moving across the columns from left to right, you see federal government, state and local government, and then this category, “Institution Funds.” As with most of these big research universities, this is a huge number. UCSF reports to the NSF that it spends more than $500 million a year of its own internal funds on research.

    The reason? Extramurally sponsored research, almost all in science and engineering, loses massive amounts of money even at current recovery rates, day after day, year in, year out. This is not because anyone is doing anything wrong. It is because the infrastructure of contemporary science is very expensive.

    Here’s where we need to build a full counternarrative to the existing one. The existing one, shared by university administrators and Trumpers alike, posits the fiction that universities break even on research. UCSF states, “The University requires full F&A cost recovery.” This is actually a regulative ideal that has never been achieved.

    The reality is this:

    UCSF spends half a billion dollars of its own funding to support its $2 billion total in research. That money comes from the state, from tuition, from clinical revenues and some—less than you’d think—from private donors and corporate sponsors. If NIH’s cuts go through, UCSF’s internal losses on research—the money it has to make up—suddenly jump from an already-high $505 million to $743 million in the current year. This is a complete disaster for the UCSF budget. It will massively hit research, students, the campuses’ state employees, everything.

    The current strategy of chronicling the damage from cuts is good. But it isn’t enough. I’m pleased to see the Association of American Universities, a group of high-end research universities, stating plainly that “colleges and universities pay for 25 percent of total academic R&D expenditures from their own funds. This university contribution amounted to $27.7 billion in FY23, including $6.8 billion in unreimbursed F&A costs.” All university administrations need to shift to this kind of candor.

    Unless the new NIH cuts are put in the context of continuous and severe losses on university research, the public, politicians, journalists, et al. cannot possibly understand the severity of the new crisis. And it will get lost in the blizzard of a thousand Trump-created crises, one of which is affecting pretty much every single person in the country.

    Finally, our full counternarrative needs a third element: showing that systemic fiscal losses on research are in fact good, marvelous, a true public service. A loss on a public good is not a bad and embarrassing fact. Research is supposed to lose money: The university loses money on science so that society gets long-term gains from it. Science has a negative return on investment for the university that conducts it so that there is a massively positive ROI for society, of both the monetary and nonmonetary kind. Add up the education, the discoveries, the health, social, political and cultural benefits: The university courts its own endless fiscal precarity so that society benefits.

    We should also remind everyone that the only people who make money on science are in business. And even there, ROI can take years or decades. Commercial R&D, with a focus on product development and sales, also runs losses. Think of “AI”: Microsoft alone is spending $80 billion on it in 2025, on top of $50 billion in 2024, with no obviously strong revenues yet in sight. This is a huge amount of risky investment—it compares to $60 billion for federal 2023 R&D expenditures on all topics in all disciplines. I’m an AI skeptic but appreciate Microsoft’s reminder that new knowledge means taking losses and plenty of them.

    These up-front losses generate much greater future value of nonmonetary as well as monetary kinds. Look at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Harvard University, et al. in Table 22 above. The sector spent nearly $28 billion of its own money generously subsidizing sponsors’ research, including by subsidizing the federal government itself.

    There’s much more to say about the long-term social compact behind this—how the actual “private sector” gets 100 percent ICR or significantly more, how state cuts factor into this, how student tuition now subsidizes more of STEM research than is fair, how research losses have been a denied driver of tuition increases. There’s more to say about the long-term decline of public universities as research centers that, when properly funded, allow knowledge creation to be distributed widely in the society.

    But my point here is that opening the books on large everyday research losses, especially biomedical research losses of the kind NIH creates, is the only way that journalists, politicians and the wider public will see through the Trumpian lie about these ICR “efficiencies.” It’s also the only way to move toward the full cost recovery that universities deserve and that research needs.

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  • When the chair-president “marriage” goes sour (opinion)

    When the chair-president “marriage” goes sour (opinion)

    In a conversation recently with someone whose presidency and mine overlapped (1992–2003), we talked about how even though we worked 24-7 and lost a fair amount of sleep, we mainly loved what we did and even had lots of fun doing it. That is not what I am hearing today from presidents I know, nearly all of whom use language like “I’m worn out” and “I can’t wait to retire.” It is therefore not surprising that the average presidential tenure, according to a recent American Council on Education survey, has decreased significantly in recent years (from 8.5 years to 5.9).

    As I have often learned during my 18 years as a higher ed consultant, short presidential tenures take a toll on their institutions. Even in the best of circumstances, presidential transitions are time-consuming. Searches frequently take nine or more months, during which time planning and even implementation of previously approved plans often get put on hold. Departing presidents are frequently viewed as lame ducks, while interim presidents are often seen as placeholders, whose presence similarly delays institutional progress.

    Then, too, during the first year of a new presidency, campus communities generally are trying to decide if the new president is trustworthy and capable. If the previous president left under negative circumstances, people on campus are likely to be especially skittish about new leadership. Moreover, many new presidents are so focused on learning about the institution and its people that they defer important decisions until their second year.

    That used to make things difficult; now in these fraught times for higher education, it can be catastrophic.

    Successful presidents simultaneously serve a variety of different groups (students, faculty, staff, alumni, the community, donors and the board), many of whom have conflicting interests and concerns. As I tell presidents I coach, their board has the responsibility to hire and fire them, so their board is inevitably their most important constituency.

    Given the array and complexity of presidential responsibilities, many of which require confidentiality, it’s not surprising that a campus community doesn’t know all the ins and outs of how their presidents spend their time and the issues with which they deal. Indeed, on most campuses and even for some board members, the issues presidents must contend with are a black box.

    In this context, the president’s connection to the board is typically opaque to the broader campus community. Indeed, as is also true for most marriages, it’s almost impossible for those not in the relationship to know what really happens inside it. And of course, if a board loses confidence in the president, the result is a divorce in which the president is the one who leaves. (Two personal confessions come to mind in this regard: First, as a former Faulkner scholar, I am mindful of the importance of narrative, am alert to unreliable narrators and am always aware that history, culture and memory affect perception. And second, despite the fact that I have never taken a course in clinical psychology, I sometimes believe that clients with unhealthy board-president relationships may need a marriage counselor in addition to a higher ed consultant.)

    In any case, when the president-chair relationship is troubled, it is almost always presidents who find themselves on shaky ground. And although I am happy to say that the majority of president-chair relationships that I have observed are positive, I have been recently observed what seems to be an uptick in the souring of such relationships.

    Specifically, a dozen presidents—at least half of whom were in a second contract—have described their relationship with their chair as deeply problematic. In a number of these instances, I should stress, the chair who was in place when the president was hired has rotated out of that position and the new chair is for various reasons less invested in the president’s success. (Note: In the interest of confidentiality, none of my examples derive from clients with whom I have begun to work in the last year. In fact, a number of these examples come from institutions with which I’ve not had a consulting relationship but where I know well the president and/or the chair.)

    The most common complaint I hear is from presidents who characterize their chair as a micromanager who is inappropriately engaged in operational decisions—despite the fact that in every institution I know, board bylaws call for the trustees to delegate operational responsibility to the president. As a result, these boards often spend their time in the proverbial weeds rather than focusing on their primary fiduciary responsibility and their responsibilities for strategy and policies.

    I also have heard about chairs who have—without presidential knowledge much less involvement—talked directly with faculty and staff (and sometimes even students), ignoring the best practice that all trustees, including the chair, who wish to interact with those on campus should work with and through the president or, if the president so specifies, the board secretary. (The exception to this is trustee committee chairs who have direct conversations about the work of their committee with their administrative liaison, typically a vice president. At the same time, in healthy institutions presidents are fully informed about and often participate in such conversations.)

    Some examples:

    • A chair at a research university crossed the boundary from governance into management by inappropriately meeting with individual faculty members without the president’s knowledge in his quest to gain support for his personal belief that the provost should be let go, even though he knew the president wished to retain the provost.
    • The board chair at a liberal arts college met with individual faculty members without the president’s knowledge to dissuade them from addressing diversity or gender in their classes.
    • The board chair at a small comprehensive college met with members of the campus community off-site to seek reasons to let the president go.

    The first two presidents subsequently left the institution they were leading, dismayed that their chair was ignoring the fact that as president, they were the board’s only employee and that all other employees essentially work for the president. The third president ended up being fired, based on the chair’s conversations.

    Why has this happened? My suspicion is that it is related to the coarsening of discourse generally and the growing partisanship in this country and beyond. Until roughly the last decade, I was struck by how much those of us in the academy—faculty, staff, administrators and trustees—truly placed a high value on civil discourse, with colleges and universities typically priding themselves on being places where people could disagree passionately but with mutual respect, or at least the appearance of that respect. But in recent years, this is no longer the case. Instead, as we are seeing, families and friends are torn apart by differing points of views. Congress, which was once a place where people argued fervently with those with whom they disagreed but then spent congenial social time together, is now similarly torn apart. And although colleges and universities ideally should not be the playground for partisan politics, that is no longer the case.

    I believe that in this context, particularly at a time when so many colleges and universities are vulnerable (think for example about the enrollment cliff), the president-chair relationship is even more critical than ever. Presidents and boards, especially their chairs, are entrusted in different ways with the health and integrity—financial and academic—of the institutions they serve. Successful presidents and chairs both have a clear understanding of and respect for their differing roles and responsibilities. In the most successful of these relationships, chairs see themselves as the president’s strategic partner and presidents see the board as a strategic advantage to the institution.

    But in those instances where the relationship is strained, entire communities of faculty, staff, students, alumni, donors and others are often negatively affected even if few if any of them are aware of this problematic leadership dynamic. Indeed, members of the campus community in these cases are like families and friends of those in a fragile marriage—they don’t know what’s really going on, but they know enough to be unsettled.

    So what do we do about all of this? Although I know enough now to know that we aren’t likely to change the larger culture, I do recommend that college and university boards set aside time—certainly in new trustee orientation and at least once a year for the entire board in an executive session—to address the question of how trustees interact with one another and with the campuses that they have committed to serve. I further recommend that boards commit to a regular process by which they are reviewed. For example, if a board has retained an outside consultant to do a 360-degree review of the president, I suggest that they ask that same consultant to make recommendations about the board’s functioning, particularly in terms of its behavior in relation to the president and the senior leadership team. But most of all, I hope that trustees, who at their best are focused on the health and integrity of the institution, will understand how important it is that they model respect for others and the civil discourse that is necessary not only for board service but for the health of our larger society.

    Susan Resneck Pierce is president of SRP Consulting, president emerita of the University of Puget Sound and author of On Being Presidential (2011) and Governance Reconsidered (2014), both published by Jossey-Bass and sponsored by Inside Higher Ed.

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