Tag: opinion

  • Reflections of a Former Presidential Spouse (opinion)

    Reflections of a Former Presidential Spouse (opinion)

    In August, Denise A. Battles stepped down after 10-plus years as president of the State University of New York at Geneseo to take a position with the SUNY system, which meant that my term as her presidential spouse came to an expected but abrupt end. I have since spent a great deal of time musing about my decade in that role, the joys and heartbreaks, the triumphs and the tragedies, and even the title … First Man? First Dude? It’s an odd occupation, since nationwide the job description is either nonexistent or as varied as the institutions where spouses and partners serve. My purpose here is to offer a few observations, derived from my experiences and those of my peers, and also humbly offer some advice to present and future executive spouses and partners.

    Denise and I met at our new faculty orientation, which seems like a lifetime ago, and grew up together as academics. She chose administration early on, and I taught for decades before giving up faculty status to become a full-time fellowship director. As she advanced from dean to provost to president, my role as the administrative “trailing” spouse altered in both subtle and overt ways at each new institution, but the core was always rooted in our dedication to the universities we served and to each other. We were fortunate to always be employed at the same university and offered ourselves to search committees as a package deal. Many of my peers gave up careers to serve as dedicated presidential spouses and partners or have positions in business or with outside organizations. For some, their ties to the institution come down to an occasional student play or alumni meet-and-greet, a few calendar events to plan and dress for. Others appear on campus virtually every day, though doing so can be fraught with peril. What’s the old saw? Why do presidents get fired? Houses and spouses (cue laughter).

    There’s a kind of isolation that comes with being a presidential spouse or partner, as virtually everyone at the institution or the surrounding community seems to either work in some way for the president or chancellor or is related to or knows someone who does. That reality leaves a distance, an unspoken space many feel from campus and community acquaintances and even those considered friends. I often discussed this condition with other board members of the spouses-and-partners group that is affiliated with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) and for which I served for over a decade. Many feel a sense of remoteness even with the myriad social outlets that come with the role—entertaining, dinners, social and athletic events, fine arts performances, donor visits, local clubs and organizations. The pandemic left many of us questioning the roles we played as presidential spouses and partners and what the future would bring for our ghostly campuses, overworked partners and largely absent student body. In many ways, that anxiety has not much changed.

    My wife and I were lucky enough to live in a stately historic presidential residence on Main Street in a quaint western New York village, mere steps from the campus. We would often sit on the front porch and greet the students and villagers, even the mayor, walking by … Pleasant as it was, we never forgot we were living in someone else’s house. I still work remotely with fellowships on a phased retirement plan for the college and recently have found myself missing the bustle of the campus and community, attending campus events, and even wearing the golden name badge signifying I was part of the campus team.

    During Denise’s presidency, I would see her mostly only at the end of the day, after she had been dealing with perhaps a sticky personnel matter or one of the myriad other pressing issues on campus, and when she was still digesting the implications and finding solutions. We followed a strict code of confidentiality and professionalism about discussing these matters, which meant I was often not privy to what may have been happening. I made it a point in casual conversation with the campus and village community to refer to Denise as “the president,” to subtly suggest that I was not some kind of informational conduit and also that I knew little. After a while, folks stopped asking.

    Most presidential spouses and partners ache to do more to help their loved ones but know that unconditional support is the best strategy. They are not vice presidents or back-door conduits, as there are plenty of people on campus to serve those functions. Of course, it is true that university chancellors and presidents are well compensated for their work, but the grind offers little respite and few moments for a personal life or chances to escape the endless crises. The average life of a college presidency has shrunk to a mere 5.9 years due to the strain. Faculty, staff and, yes, administrators are being asked to do more, even as they feel anxiety about what the future will bring for their families and positions. As perhaps never before, our campuses must find a unity of purpose to face the fallout from domestic politics and world events.

    Presidential partners often face unexpected challenges when crises arise, as they may become targets for disgruntled and mentally unstable individuals from the campus and community, an unsettling and frightening reality that I unfortunately experienced too many times. Early on, I made the decision to eschew social media entirely, as the viciousness and ignorance were both unrelenting and entirely predictable. These potential grim truths are features of the job, but in the absence of some kind of orientation or guidebook, many partners are left to deal with these situations alone without anyone to confide in but their harried presidents, who can commiserate but may be legally and ethically barred from reciprocating.

    Like many presidential couples, my wife and I have been together day in and day out, pretty much continuously, since we began in academia. But “together” is a bit of a misstatement, as even though we were under the same roof, the work never ended, the email only increased and, if possible, our time together talking as a couple about the everyday things and our future was ever more brief. That reality is echoed in stories I hear from my spousal and partner colleagues across the nation—presidential relationships are being tested as never before.

    So, here’s my advice to present and future presidential partners, humbly offered and born from 10 years on the job. I could list 20 more points, but these seem like the most important ones.

    1. Make the role your own. Since there is no template, you can choose what to be or not to be, regardless of what a predecessor may have been or done. Garden club membership is not required, and you can miss that regular season game. Take your time before committing and remember that you can always say no.
    2. Find supporters and confidants among your spouse and partner peers. Family and friends are often well meaning, but, as with many occupations, cannot really understand what you are going through. AASCU’s Spouse and Partner Program offers a safe and confidential circle of fellow travelers who are more than willing to lend an ear and offer their own experiences to help you through your struggles as you help them through theirs. I recommend membership highly.
    3. Be there for your president or chancellor. Listen, but don’t try to fix anything. Doing so can be the hardest part of the job. Sometimes they just need to vent, especially during the worst of times—and if they seem upset or a bit hostile, usually it’s not about you. You are not an administrator; no one hired you to advise, and doing so may make things worse. They are privy to information that may frankly be none of your business, until it is, and if so, they will tell you what you need to know.

    In writing this piece, I don’t seek pity or sympathy for spouses and partners. I fully acknowledge the privileges that my position as a presidential spouse entailed and feel a deep sense of gratitude for having been given the opportunity to serve the university and the community. I have spent my entire working career in academia as an educator and, with this essay, seek only to inform the larger academic community as to the nature of the job and counsel those who may assume the role at some point. Presidential spouses and partners will continue to live in a strange kind of uncertainty as they struggle to support their presidents and chancellors, often while surrounded by acquaintances but still largely alone, and a bit uncertain as to what their roles truly require.

    Michael Mills is director of national fellowships and scholarships at the State University of New York at Geneseo.

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  • Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    Faculty Merit Act Is Meritless (opinion)

    A recent op-ed by David Randall, executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars, argues that faculty hiring in American universities has become so corrupt that it requires sweeping legislative intervention. NAS’s proposed Faculty Merit Act would require public universities to publish every higher ed standardized test score—SAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT and more—of every faculty member and every applicant for that faculty member’s position across different stages of a faculty search. The goal, they claim, is to expose discrimination and restore meritocracy.

    Letter to the editor

    A letter has been submitted in response to this article. You can read the letter here, and view all of our letters to the editor here.

    The proposal’s logic is explicit: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If average scores decline from round to round, or if the eventual hire scored lower than dozens—or even hundreds—of rejected applicants, the public, Randall argues, should be able to “see that something is wrong.”

    But the Faculty Merit Act rests on a serious misunderstanding of how measurement and selection actually work. Even if one accepts Randall’s premise that a standardized test score “isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit,” the conclusions he draws simply do not follow. The supposed red flags the proposed act promises to reveal are not evidence of corruption. They are the expected mathematical consequences of using an imperfect measure in a large applicant pool.

    I am a data scientist who works on issues of social justice. What concerns me is not only that NAS’s proposal is statistically unsound, but that it would mislead the public while presenting itself as transparent.

    A Statistical Mistake

    The proposed act depends on a simple idea: If standardized test scores are a reasonable proxy for faculty merit, then a fair search should select someone with a very high score. If the person hired has a lower score than many rejected applicants, or if average scores decline from round to round, something must be amiss.

    This sounds intuitive. It is also wrong.

    To see why, imagine the following setup. Every applicant has some level of “true merit” for a faculty job—originality, research judgment, teaching ability, intellectual fit. We cannot observe this truth directly. Instead, we observe a standardized test score, which captures some aspects of ability but misses many others. In other words, the test score contains two parts: a signal (the part related to actual merit) and noise (everything else the test does not measure).

    Now suppose a search attracts 300 applicants, as in Randall’s own example. Assume—very generously—that the search committee somehow identifies the single best applicant by true merit and hires that person.

    Here is the crucial point: Even if test scores are meaningfully related to true merit, the best applicant will almost never have the highest test score.

    Why? Because when many people are competing, even moderate noise overwhelms rank ordering. A noisy measure will always misrank some individuals, and the larger the pool, the more dramatic those misrankings become. This is the same reason that ranking professional athletes by a single skill—free-throw percentage, say—would routinely misidentify the best overall players, especially in a large league.

    How Strong Is the Test-Merit Relationship, Really?

    Before putting numbers on this, we should ask a basic empirical question: How strongly do standardized tests actually predict the kinds of outcomes that matter in academia?

    The most comprehensive recent research on the GRE—the test most relevant to graduate education—finds minimal predictive value. A meta-analysis of more than 200 studies found that GRE scores explain just over 3 percent of the variation in graduate outcomes such as GPA, degree completion and licensing exam performance. For graduate GPA specifically—the outcome the test is explicitly designed to predict—GRE scores explained only about 4 percent of the variance.

    These studies assess near-term prediction within the same educational context: GRE scores predicting outcomes for the very students who took the test, measured only a few years later—under conditions maximally favorable to the test’s validity. The NAS proposal extrapolates from evidence that is already weak even under these favorable conditions. It would evaluate faculty hiring using test scores—often SAT scores—taken at age 17, applied to candidates who may now be in their 30s, 40s or older. Direct evidence for that kind of long-term extrapolation is scarce. However, the limited evidence that does exist points towards weak relationships rather than strong ones. For instance, Google’s internal hiring studies famously found “very little correlation” between SAT scores and job performance.

    Taken together, the research suggests that any realistic relationship between standardized test scores and faculty merit is weak—certainly well below the levels needed to support NAS’s proposed diagnostics.

    What This Means in Practice

    The proposed Faculty Merit Act raises an important practical question: Even if standardized test scores contain some information about merit, how useful are they when hundreds of applicants compete for a single job?

    Taking the GRE meta-analysis at face value, standardized test scores correlate with relevant academic outcomes at only about 0.18. Treating that number as a proxy for faculty merit is already generous, given the decades that often separate testing from hiring and the profound differences between standardized exams and the actual work of a professor. But let us grant it anyway.

    Now, consider a search with 300 applicants. With a correlation of 0.18, I calculate that the single strongest candidate by true merit would typically score only around the 70th percentile on the test—roughly 90th out of 300. In other words, it would be entirely normal for around 90 rejected applicants to have higher test scores than the eventual hire.

    Nothing improper has happened. No favoritism or manipulation is required. This outcome follows automatically from combining a weak proxy with a large applicant pool.

    Even if we assume a much stronger relationship—say, a correlation of 0.30, which already exceeds what the evidence supports for most academic outcomes—the basic conclusion does not change. Under that assumption, I calculate that the best candidate would typically score only around the 80th percentile, corresponding to a rank near 60 out of 300. Dozens of rejected applicants would still have higher test scores than the person who gets the job.

    This is the point the proposal gets exactly backward. The pattern it treats as a red flag—a hire whose test score is lower than that of many rejected applicants—is not evidence of corruption. It is the normal, mathematically expected outcome whenever selection relies on an imperfect measure. Scaling this diagnostic across many searches does not make it informative; it simply reproduces the same expected misrankings at a larger scale.

    Why ‘Scores Dropped Each Round’ Proves Nothing

    The same logic applies to the claim that average test scores should increase at each stage of a search.

    Faculty hiring is not one-dimensional. Early stages might screen for general competence; later stages may emphasize originality, research direction, teaching effectiveness and departmental fit—traits that standardized tests measure poorly or not at all. As a search progresses, committees naturally place less weight on test scores and more weight on other information. When that happens, average test scores among finalists can stay flat or even decline. That pattern does not signal manipulation. It signals that the committee is selecting on dimensions that actually matter for the job.

    Transparency, Justice and Bad Diagnostics

    Randall’s op-ed, published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, frames the proposal as a response to injustice. But transparency based on invalid diagnostics does not mitigate injustice; it produces it.

    Publishing standardized test scores invites the public to draw conclusions that those numbers cannot support—and those conclusions will not fall evenly. Standardized test scores are strongly shaped by socioeconomic background and access to resources. Treating them as a universal yardstick of merit—especially for faculty careers—will predictably disadvantage scholars from marginalized and nontraditional paths.

    From the standpoint of justice, this is deeply concerning. Accountability mechanisms must rest on sound reasoning. Otherwise, they become tools for enforcing hierarchy rather than fairness.

    If the goal is genuine academic renewal, it should begin with renewing our understanding of what numbers can—and cannot—tell us. Merit cannot be mandated by publishing the wrong metrics, and justice is not served by statistical arguments that collapse under careful inspection.

    Chad M. Topaz is a faculty member at Williams College; co-founder of the Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity and Equity; and winner of the Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice from the Association for Women in Mathematics. He is the author of Unlocking Justice: The Power of Data to Confront Inequity and Create Change, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in May, and can be found on Bluesky at @chadtopaz.

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  • The Hidden Tax Students Pay for Your AI Strategy (opinion)

    The Hidden Tax Students Pay for Your AI Strategy (opinion)

    University leaders are thinking a lot about AI. Some institutions are purchasing site licenses, others forming task forces and others are drafting policies focused on academic honesty. Meanwhile, students are quietly bearing a cost that few are tracking: between $1,200 and $1,800 over four years in AI tool subscriptions that fragmented and unenforceable institutional policies have made necessary.

    Here’s what a typical student experience looks like. Freshman fall semester: The composition professor bans ChatGPT even though the university has a site license. The biology lab recommends NotebookLM for research synthesis. The math professor encourages Wolfram|Alpha Pro Premium at $8.25 per month. Spring semester brings a different writing professor, who requires Grammarly Pro at $12 monthly, while the computer science intro professor suggests GitHub Copilot Pro for $10 monthly (though it’s worth noting here—props to GitHub Copilot—that verified students may be eligible for free access to the Pro plan). Meanwhile, the research methods professor advises students to “use AI responsibly” without defining what that means.

    As students progress, the costs compound. Statistics courses need IBM SPSS Statistics with AI features or Jupyter with premium compute, such as through a Google CoLab Pro subscription ($9.99 per month). Marketing classes require Canva Pro for design projects at $15 monthly. Capstone courses recommend Claude Pro at $20 monthly, or premium versions of research tools like Consensus or Elicit running anywhere from $10 to more than $40 per month. Different courses equal different tools, and the subscription stack grows. The money matters—$1,200 to $1,800 is significant for students already stretching every dollar. But the financial burden reveals something more troubling about how policy fragmentation or policy stall is undermining educational equity and mission. The problem runs deeper than institutional inaction.

    Without coordination, universities face two unsatisfying options. Option one: Buy nothing centrally. Students bear the full cost—potentially $4 million to $7 million in aggregate per year for a 15,000-student institution—creating massive equity gaps and graduates unprepared for AI-integrated careers. Option two: Attempt institutional licensing. But this means more than purchasing a single large language model. Writing disciplines might work with ChatGPT or Claude. But other disciplines might need GitHub Copilot, Canva Pro, AI-enhanced modeling platforms, Consensus, Elicit, AI features in SPSS or premium Jupyter compute. There are thousands of AI platforms out there.

    A truly comprehensive strategy for a large university could exceed $2 million annually—with no guarantee of faculty adoption or pedagogical integration. So even with an investment, without consensus or agreement, students might still experience this AI tax. Some institutions have the financial capacity to invest in both comprehensive licensing and faculty development. But most universities facing enrollment pressures and constrained budgets cannot afford coordinated AI strategy at this scale. The result is policy paralysis while students continue paying out of pocket. Some institutions have tried a middle path, purchasing site licenses for tools like ChatGPT Edu or Claude for Education. But without cross-functional coordination, these investments often miss their mark.

    The fundamental barrier is really a structural one. Procurement authority typically resides with the chief information officer, while pedagogical decisions belong to the provost and faculty. The information technology office selects tools based on security, scalability, cost and vendor relationships and reliability. Faculty need tools based on disciplinary fit, learning outcomes and individual professional preparation. These criteria rarely align. If an institution does purchase something, it may sit underutilized while students continue paying for what they actually need or what faculty require or prefer.

    This creates the unintentional equity crisis: Two students in the same capstone course may face dramatically different access. Student A, working 20 hours weekly and Pell Grant eligible, cannot afford premium subscriptions. She uses free versions with severe limitations and usage caps—and when those caps hit midassignment, her work stalls. Student B, with family financial support, maintains premium subscriptions for every required tool with unlimited usage and priority access. Student B’s AI-enhanced work earns higher grades not because of deeper learning, but because of subscription access. Academic advantages compound over time and may continue past college and into the career.

    Universities have created an unintentional AI tax here on students that exacerbates grade inflation, does not ensure learning of content and is costing students. Universities have always operated on a principle of equal access to essential learning resources. AI has become essential to academic work, yet access remains unequal.

    The academic commons is breaking down. The coordination gap is structural—and fixable. Technology teams focus on infrastructure and security. Academic affairs manages curriculum and pedagogy. Student success addresses traditional access barriers. Financial aid handles emergency requests for support case by case. In practice, the CIO and provost rarely will coordinate at the operational level, where these decisions actually get made.

    The employability implications compound the equity concerns. One survey found that 26 percent of hiring managers now consider AI fluency a baseline requirement, with 35 percent actively looking for AI experience on résumés. Students graduating without systematic AI literacy preparation face workforce disadvantages that mirror the educational inequities they experienced, disadvantages that may extend into career outcomes and lifetime earnings.

    The real question isn’t “What should we buy?” Instead, universities need to ask themselves, “What is AI fluency and how do we know if students are getting it?” Then, “How do we make strategic decisions about what gets institutional investment—not just licenses but also faculty buy-in and development—versus what students purchase?” That requires executive-level strategic coordination that bridges IT and academic affairs, something most universities lack.

    The conversations are happening in separate silos when they need to converge. Until they do, universities will continue creating hidden taxes for students while wondering why AI investments aren’t delivering promised educational transformation. Students caught in this gap might not even be aware it is happening and not have the language or platform to name it.

    Higher education’s democratic mission requires equal access to essential learning tools. AI has become essential. Access remains unequal. Costs are passed to the students. The longer institutions delay action, the wider these gaps grow.

    Kenneth Sumner is founder and principal of Beacon Higher Education, which provides AI governance consulting for colleges and universities. He previously served as provost at Manhattan University and has held associate provost and dean roles at Montclair State University. He holds advanced AI strategy and design and innovation certifications from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University School of Business.

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  • Faculty Are Often Unprepared to Teach About Race (opinion)

    Faculty Are Often Unprepared to Teach About Race (opinion)

    Faculty teaching about race do so in a moment when public scrutiny of higher education is heightened, federal policies are shifting, and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives are being dismantled. Even as the stakes continue rising, the instructional support for teaching race remains thin. Classroom missteps become fodder for political commentary, investigations and legislative action, not because DEI is failing—but because higher education has not prepared faculty for the instructional demands of this work.

    In recent years, a series of classroom incidents has sparked social media outrage and press coverage questioning whether faculty can responsibly teach about race and racism. This past fall, a federal civil rights complaint filed against Colorado State University objected to how two social-work instructors were teaching about race: The instructors reportedly detailed in a journal article how they treated discomfort as a measure of instructional success, characterizing student dissent as “whitelash” or an attempt to maintain “white emotional comfort.” And, in November, Texas A&M University adopted sweeping new rules restricting professors from advocating for “race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” after an instructor’s lesson on gender identity drew political scrutiny.

    Similar conflicts, large and small, have surfaced at other institutions where comments, assignments or facilitation missteps around race have escalated into campuswide crises, legislative attention, or national media backlash. For critics of DEI work, the story is a familiar one, each conflict another example of what they believe is a misguided and coercive approach to discussing race in the academy.

    But these cases are not evidence that DEI is failing. They’re evidence that higher education continues to position instructors to teach about race without adequate preparation, support or instructional training. The result is predictable. Classroom conversations break down, students withdraw or react defensively, and faculty fall back on reductive frameworks that flatten complexity instead of deepening understanding. When the inevitable conflict arises, external critics seize on those moments as proof that DEI itself is the problem.

    As someone who has spent more than two decades teaching courses on race and racism, preparing PK-12 educators and school leaders, and facilitating difficult conversations across racial, political and socioeconomic contexts, I recognize many of the dynamics described in recent reports.

    I have seen classrooms fracture when conversations about race are mishandled. I have also seen classrooms strengthen and deepen when race is taught skillfully, developmentally and with transparency about the learning process—not with the goal of making certain students, based on their race, feel uncomfortable.

    Why Higher Ed Keeps Getting This Wrong

    Too often, instructors are left to navigate high-stakes, emotionally charged conversations with little guiding them beyond readings and good intentions. They confuse discomfort with learning or treat identity categories as complete explanations for how students respond. They assume that naming systemic racism is enough to foster insight. They treat emotional reactions as confessions rather than data. And they interpret dissent as avoidance rather than inquiry.

    Teaching about race is not the same thing as talking about race. It is not sufficient to have strong convictions, an antiracist syllabus or a set of readings that challenge dominant narratives. Teaching about race effectively, humanely and rigorously is adaptive work. It requires attention to the meaning-making capacities adults bring to the classroom, the emotional and cognitive demands of confronting unfamiliar histories, and the complex identity threats that discussions of racism can activate.

    Unfortunately, many college instructors are asked to lead these conversations without any formal preparation in adult learning theory, without much practice facilitating difficult dialogues, and without much exposure to exercising racial literacy skills. Graduate programs rarely include coursework on how adults learn, how to hold tension productively, or how to differentiate instruction for learners at different developmental stages. Faculty development programs typically focus on instructional tools, strategies or course design, not the psychological and relational capacities required to teach race well.

    The result is that many faculty default to one of two equally ineffective approaches: avoidance, in which the fear of mistakes or conflict leads instructors to sanitize discussions about race or eliminate them entirely; or overcorrection, in which instructors push students into discomfort prematurely, recast struggle as resistance or treat identity categories as proxies for understanding. Both approaches undermine learning. And both approaches, ironically, feed the narrative that DEI is coercive, dogmatic or intellectually fragile.

    Misinterpreting Discomfort

    A common misstep in teaching about race and racism is treating discomfort as the goal rather than the byproduct of learning. Discomfort emerges when students confront unfamiliar histories or grapple with the implications of structural racism. But causing discomfort without further reflection is not instructive. In fact, adult learning research shows that when learners do not understand why they feel discomfort, or when they interpret it as a personal indictment rather than information, they often shut down, deflect or retreat into defensiveness.

    Barbara Larrivee’s work on reflective teaching practice emphasizes that adults deepen their reflective capacity not when they are emotionally overwhelmed, but when they can connect feelings to meaning. Tyrone Howard is especially clear that reflective practice around race is emotionally demanding and must be scaffolded, particularly for students who have had limited or no prior engagement with racial analysis.

    Deborah Helsing, Annie Howell, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey’s research demonstrates that adults grow when they can safely examine their assumptions, not when they are forced into emotional exposure without a supportive structure. Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Martin Linsky’s concept of a “holding environment” underscores the importance of creating a space strong enough to contain tension and flexible enough to meet learners where they are developmentally.

    When instructors lack this grounding, discomfort can be misread as resistance, and resistance can be treated as evidence of fragility without further inquiry. The learning process collapses.

    Identity Is Context, Not Destiny

    Another pitfall revealed in some cases that escalate into public controversy is the assumption that a student’s response can be fully explained by racial or gender identity. While identity informs perspective, it does not predetermine it. H. Richard Milner IV consistently argues that classroom discussions of race must be deliberate, contextual and connected to students’ lived realities, structural inequities and institutional power.

    Treating students as illustrations of demographic categories rather than as complex thinkers with varied histories and meaning-making capacities undermines trust and flattens what should be a nuanced dialogue. It also discourages dissent and the kind of intellectual engagement that we are meant to cultivate. Students deserve classrooms where questions are welcomed, disagreements are examined rather than punished, and identity is treated as a lens, not a verdict.

    The Real Risk: We Are Handing Evidence to DEI’s Critics

    Faculty who teach about race are working in a political climate where the stakes are extraordinarily high. White House executive orders and state laws across the country have restricted what can be taught about race. Public trust in higher education is declining. DEI offices are being dismantled.

    In this landscape, when classrooms fall apart, the consequences extend far beyond a single course. They reinforce public misconceptions about DEI, embolden efforts to roll back equity-focused policies, and weaken institutional commitments to preparing students for democratic citizenship in a multiracial society.

    Conservative media has built a profitable outrage economy from these incidents, some real and some exaggerated. Every time a classroom implodes, the anti-DEI movement grows stronger with a new case affirming a preexisting narrative: DEI is dogma, DEI is coercion, DEI is emotional manipulation, DEI is identity reductionism.

    But these explanations are not the inevitable outcomes of teaching about race; they are the avoidable consequences of poorly designed learning environments and instructors’ unexamined assumptions. They describe the worst of DEI as if it were the whole of DEI. And colleges, by failing to teach race well, continue to hand DEI’s critics the evidence they need.

    Making the Pivot

    Adults do not grow when they are humiliated, cornered or shamed into silence. They grow when instructors make their reasoning visible, invite critique and create structured environments where difficult emotions can be examined rather than weaponized. Students learn when they are challenged in ways that help them make meaning of their experiences, not in ways that reinforce fear or defensiveness.

    Through trial, error and learning alongside colleagues committed to adaptive adult learning, I’ve found that effective teaching about race requires several related commitments:

    Instructional transparency: making our own assumptions, reasoning and uncertainties visible so that students understand the purpose and process of the learning.

    A shared framework for inquiry: establishing norms that distinguish exploration from accusation and help students make sense of emotional responses without weaponizing them.

    Developmentally aligned challenges: recognizing that students arrive with different capacities for complexity and designing learning opportunities that meet them where they are, while nudging them forward.

    Treating dissent as data: understanding pushback not as avoidance, but as information about what needs clarification, probing or more practical contextualization.

    When faculty practice these commitments, difficult conversations are not something to endure—they are opportunities for insight. Discomfort emerges organically rather than being imposed. Identity becomes context, not destiny. And students stay in the work long enough for significant learning to occur.

    If colleges and universities want students to think critically about history, identity, power and inequality, they must invest in preparing faculty for that work. That means faculty development centered on adult learning, racial literacy, adaptive teaching and facilitation of complex intergroup dialogue, not just compliance training or lists of “dos and don’ts.” It means recognizing that teaching about race is sophisticated instructional work, not a box to check.

    Without institutional support from university leaders, faculty will continue to be underprepared to teach subject matter deemed too politically controversial—despite its importance to preparing civic-minded, informed citizens capable of productive dialogue with people who have entirely different viewpoints and life experiences.

    A Call to Higher Education

    The recent controversies at Colorado State, Texas A&M or those yet to be reported should not discourage colleges and universities (or PK-12 schools) from teaching about race or lead them to abandon the faculty committed to doing so responsibly. If this moment helps us move toward a more rigorous, developmental and humane approach to teaching about race and racism, it will have done something important. It could challenge us to teach race far better than many of us do.

    John Pascarella is a professor of clinical education at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and chief academic officer of the USC Race and Equity Center.

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  • OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    by Madison Forde, The Hechinger Report
    January 12, 2026

    Last month, a Boston University junior proudly posted online that he had spent months calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report Latino workers at a neighborhood car wash.

    Nine people were detained, including siblings and a 67-year-old man who has lived in the U.S. for decades. The student celebrated the arrests and told ICE to “pump up the numbers.”

    As the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a researcher who studies immigrant-origin youth, I was shaken but not surprised. This incident, which did have some backlash, revealed a growing problem on college campuses: Many young people are learning to police one another rather than learn alongside one another.

    That means the new border patrol could be your classmate. Our schools are not prepared for this.

    That is why colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging and take immediate steps to prevent it — as they do with racism, antisemitism and homophobia.

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    The incident at Boston University is bigger than one student with extreme views. We are living in a moment shaped by online outrage, anonymous tip lines and a culture that encourages reporting anyone who seems “suspicious.”

    In this environment, some young people have started to believe that calling ICE is a form of civic duty.

    That thinking doesn’t stay online. It walks right into classrooms, dorms and group projects. When it does, the impact is not abstract. It is deeply personal for the immigrant-origin youth sitting in those same rooms.

    Many of these students grew up with fear woven into their daily lives. Their neighbors disappeared overnight, they heard stories of parents being detained at work and they began translating legal mail before they were old enough to drive. They know exactly what an ICE call can set into motion. They carry that fear with them to school.

    These are not hypothetical harms. They show up in everyday decisions: where to sit, what to say, whom to trust. I’ve met students who avoid speaking Spanish on campus, refuse to share their address during class activities and sit near the exits because they’re not sure who views their family as “a threat.” It is not possible to learn well in an environment where you do not feel safe.

    There is a strong body of developmental research highlighting belonging and social inclusion as central to healthy development. In her work on migration and acculturation, Carola Suárez-Orozco shows that legal-status-based distinctions among youth intensify exclusion and undermine both social integration and developmental well-being.

    When belonging erodes, colleges begin to function like small border zones, where everyone is quietly assessing who might turn them in. It is nearly impossible for any campus community to thrive under that kind of pressure.

    Quite frankly, nor can America’s democracy.

    If we raise a generation of students who feel compelled to police the nation’s borders from their dorms, the immigrant-origin youth sitting beside them in classrooms will carry the psychological burden of those borders every single day. Yet colleges are almost entirely unprepared for this reality.

    Most universities have clear policies for racial slurs, antisemitic threats, homophobic harassment and other identity-based harms. But very few have policies that address immigration-based targeting, even though the consequences can be just as severe and, in some cases, life-altering.

    Boston University’s president acknowledged the distress caused by that student’s actions. Yet, the university did not classify the behavior as discriminatory, despite the fact that his calls targeted a specific ethnic and immigration-status group. That silence sends a clear message: Harm against immigrant communities is unimportant, incidental or simply “political.” But this harm is neither political nor the price of free expression or civic engagement; it is targeted intimidation, with real and measurable consequences for students’ safety, mental health and academic engagement.

    In my view, colleges need to take three straightforward steps:

    1. Define immigration-based harassment as misconduct. Calling ICE on classmates, doxxing immigrant peers or circulating immigration-related rumors should be classified under the same conduct codes that protect students from other forms of targeted harm. Schools know how to do this; they simply have not applied those same protections to immigrant communities.

    2. Train faculty and staff on how to respond. Professors should have a clear understanding of what to do when immigration rhetoric is weaponized in the classroom, or when students express fear about being reported. Although many professors want to help, they may lack basic guidance.

    3. Teach immigration literacy as part of civic education. Most students do not understand what ICE detention entails, how long legal cases can drag on or what it means to live with daily fear like their immigrant peers. Teaching these realities isn’t “political indoctrination,” it is preparation for a life in a multicultural democracy.

    These three steps are not radical. They are merely the same kinds of protections colleges already provide to students targeted for other aspects of their identity.

    Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses

    The Boston University case is a warning, not an isolated moment. If campuses fail to respond, more young people will internalize the idea that policing their peers is simply part of student life. Immigrant-origin youth, who have done nothing wrong, will carry the emotional burden alone.

    As students, educators and researchers, we have to decide what kind of learning communities we want to build and sustain. Schools can be places where students understand one another, or they can become places of intense surveillance. That choice will shape not just campus climates, but also the society current students will eventually lead.

    Madison Forde is a doctoral student in the Clinical/Counseling Psychology program at New York University.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about immigration-based targeting at colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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  • In Defense of the Student-Run Magazine (opinion)

    In Defense of the Student-Run Magazine (opinion)

    Despite the economic realities of the outside world, the campus magazine survives. Or perhaps not, if other colleges and universities begin to interpret federal guidance like the University of Alabama.

    Students at my own institution, Syracuse University, put out a fashion magazine, a food magazine and a Black student life magazine last semester, among others. And that’s just one semester: Magazines come and go most years based on student interests and appetites. (I do not miss a particularly provocative, though well-designed, sex magazine.) These student-run publications are a chance for young people to develop critical thinking, writing and editorial skills as they skewer icons and interrogate their world. They are also empowering. For these digital natives, there’s something especially meaningful about committing your name and your ideas to print for all the world to see. Student media helps young people make sense of a confusing present and uncertain future.

    Students at the University of Alabama shared in this tradition until Dec. 1, when campus officials effectively eliminated two magazines. Nineteen Fifty-Six was founded in 2020 and named for the year the first Black student, Autherine Lucy Foster, enrolled at Alabama. The magazine’s website notes that it is a “student-run magazine focused on Black culture, Black excellence, and Black student experiences at The University of Alabama.” Alice magazine launched in 2015 as “a fashion and wellness magazine that serves the students of the University of Alabama.” Like most professional consumer fashion or wellness publications, women are the primary audience.

    Though Alabama’s administration cited federal anti-DEI guidance as the impetus for its decision, The Crimson White, Alabama’s student newspaper, reported that neither magazine “barred participation based on personal characteristics like race and gender identity” and that both publications had “hired staff who were not part of their target audiences.” The same is true in industry; some of the most talented editors I’ve worked with were not the target audience of the publications they led.

    In their 2021 book, Curating Culture: How Twentieth-Century Magazines Influenced America (Bloomsbury), editors and scholars Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin and Charles Whitaker observe that magazines provide “information, inspiration, empathy, and advocacy for readers with specific interests, identities, goals, and concerns.” In a 2007 article, magazine scholar David Abrahamson explains that magazines “have a special role in their readers’ lives, constructing a community or affinity group in which the readers feel they are members.” Magazines, by intention and design, are exclusive and niche. That’s why audiences love them. Today, media across all platforms follow the magazine’s lead. What is a “For You” feed if not an enticing unspooling of curated content?

    At Alabama, university officials were quick to point out that they were merely cutting financial support for the magazines, not attacking free speech, as students at public institutions are protected by the First Amendment. (Never mind that the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that public universities may charge an activity fee to fund a program that facilitates speech if the program is viewpoint neutral, meaning that funds are disbursed in way that does not privilege one perspective over another.)

    Alabama has cited Attorney General Pam Bondi’s nonbinding 2025 guidance for recipients of federal funding, suggesting that because the two magazines primarily target certain groups, they are “unlawful proxies” for discrimination. Student press advocates are unconvinced by this rationale—one called it “nonsense”—but perhaps Alabama’s leaders did not want to find out whether the modest funding used to support a magazine read by women (among others) and another read by Black people (among others) would be considered unlawful “resource allocation” or “proxy discrimination.” Or maybe eliminating funding for one magazine coded as female gave adequate cover to cut a magazine explicitly targeted at another group. That Alice magazine didn’t even identify itself as a “women’s magazine” is enough to demonstrate that whom and what content is for is no longer defined by editors or the free market, but the specter of Trump’s Department of Justice.

    The chilling effect ripples. Universities that fear retribution from the Trump administration may be wary not only of student-run magazines, but any publication produced with public funds, including scholarly journals. So watch out, Southern Historian. You may be next.

    Aileen Gallagher is a journalism professor at Syracuse University’s S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a former magazine editor.

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  • Reading Sophocles in My Community College Class (opinion)

    Reading Sophocles in My Community College Class (opinion)

    I have a rule for myself in freshman English that I don’t assign readings that require much explanation. If I continually have to provide background of a work’s history and context, it means the students are awaiting a deus ex machina, AI or me to summarize and simplify. I seek out readings that feature conversational voices that create an immediate, imaginable world that my students can understand on their own—that is, read.

    Every year, though, I make one exception to this rule and assign either Sophocles’s Oedipus the King or Antigone. They don’t get any easier, no matter how many times I teach them, but they’re worth the effort because they’re sublime, and the range of topics they provide us for discussion and writing seems inexhaustible and ever relevant. In fall 2024, with the presidential election looming, I assigned Antigone.

    “Before we start … you know family trees? I need to show you Antigone’s.” I began drawing on the whiteboard the Oedipus family tree from the bottom. “Antigone and her siblings—Ismene, Polynices, Eteocles. Their parents: Jocasta and Oedipus. Up here, Jocasta’s parents: Menoeceus and Ms. Unknown. Oedipus’s parents, Laertes and Jocasta, are over here. And because they’re characters from Greek myth and legend, we can keep going back—”

    “Professor!” calls out Varna. “You made a mistake. Jocasta can’t be Oedipus’s mother, too—right? … Right?”

    “Actually …”

    “He can’t have children with his mother.”

    “Shouldn’t have. ”

    “Mm?”

    Even before the pandemic, I had given up assigning Oedipus and Antigone as homework reading. In my classes, we read Sophocles together. On paper, out loud. “Put away your devices, please. We’re going really old-school—ancient Greek school.”

    Although some of my community college students have shaky English or discomfort with speaking aloud, at some point in our halting and struggling reading we catch the play’s spirit and profundity and are knocked back on our heels. Marie, despite her thick accent, whether reading Antigone or Creon, is inspired and masterful. Is it the theatricality or simply having to communicate the words on the page that guide her into clearer enunciation?

    Bewildered Samuel, meanwhile, eventually finds his footing and delightedly embodies the comic outlook of the Sentry. Everybody reads, taking turns with the roles. We are mostly patient with one another, and we dig in as anxious Tina loses heart and her voice notches down into her shoes and her classmates cheer her on and plead with her to speak up. The students’ encouragement of and aid to one another helps me limit my interventions, though I still continually interject with vocabulary definitions or references or to explicate idiomatic expressions or pose obvious questions to check in on comprehension. I pause us after a character’s thrilling or brilliant statement and ask them to quote this or that for us to ponder in writing.

    Reading aloud in a community college classroom is less a pleasure cruise than a field trip through a museum.

    During my recent sabbatical, while working on a biography of Max Schott, an author, one of my old teachers and my friend, I was, as must happen to some professors on leave, missing the classroom. So as a supplement to or diversion from my daily notes and questions to Max, I wrote scenes for a few weeks in the form of a play of what I remembered and imagined of what it was like to teach Oedipus the King, from the first day through the next several class sessions. Max regularly expressed enjoyment over the daily installments. That was my reward, praise from my mentor. Still, at the end, I told him on the phone that it was nice to be done.

    He said, “You’re not done.”

    “Yeah, I am. I even imagined them through the essay and the drafts!”

    “But what about Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone?”

    “Oh, I’d never try to teach those with Oedipus in the same semester. It’s freshman English.”

    “Why not?”

    “Well, they’re supposed to read essays and articles, too, and in real life the students themselves wouldn’t let me.”

    “You’re making it up anyway!” he laughed.

    I resisted for a week. I had just about finished the biography and the subject of the biography, my own mentor, was encouraging me to go on, write more about my imaginary classroom. No one else was asking for more from me.

    I reread what I had, about 150 single-spaced pages, half of which, I should say, were composed by Sophocles. I can compare my contribution to the play within a play to a quirky improvisational movie in which the soundtrack is a series of movements from Mozart’s string quartets. Whatever else is going on, the music—in my case, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King—carries a lot of intelligence and feeling.

    But Max was right—the imaginary semester wasn’t over. So for Act 2, the students having finished writing their essays, the teacher character, Bob, brings in a box of stapled copies of Oedipus at Colonus. The imagined students surprise me and are much more game than I thought possible. We proceed, not unhappily, and with interesting discussions (I thought) through Oedipus’s fateful disappearance from this land of suffering. Typing up the “transcript” of my students reading Oedipus at Colonus, I occasionally felt as if I, the writer, not the teacher character, was going through the motions for Max’s sake. Each day, pen on paper, I would reread and revise the previous day’s pages and then go on, writing by hand, through another several pages, and then type and email them off to Max. He and I were still talking once or twice a week by phone about his writing and life and about books, and he didn’t complain that the quality of my made-up classes had dropped off; hence, I knew I had to continue through Antigone. By the end of a semester’s classes, I had imagined me and my students through the three plays.

    Then I started going through old emails that I had sent Max about my real-life classes. These had been written, usually, on my phone on the subway home after my day’s teaching. “Don’t explain,” Max had often told us, his writing students, back in the day. “See if you can reveal the characters mostly through what they say.” And there, in those emails, I found my unimaginary students and me, my unimaginary self, acting sort of like the ones I’d made up.

    For example (I’ve changed their names and identifying information, but not, unfortunately, mine):

    Bob: Do we need to go over the characters in Antigone again?

    Tawny: Do we? I don’t.

    Bob: Who’s Creon?

    Class: …

    Tawny: (sighs) The king!

    Bob: Thank you … Anything else about him?

    Ashley: Antigone’s uncle?

    Bob: Yes! … Remember, we talked about identities. Paul?

    Paul: No.

    Bob: We didn’t?

    Jason: We did!

    Paul: Then I don’t remember. What’s identities anyway?

    Bob: We all have different identities depending on where we are … Here, I’m a …

    Class: …

    Bob: Right! A teacher. At home I’m Suzanne’s husband. Just like you’re in a role at home and another role at work and another here.

    Tawny: And so?

    Bob: In your paper, as a character yourself, you’re going to have to talk to one of the characters as they are at the end of the play … So where are they, what are they, when the play ends?

    Marcus: Creon’s alive.

    Bob: Right! And you can’t say that for …

    Ryann: Antigone.

    Bob: Right! Or … Haemon or … Eurydice. But the play is over, and you have to talk to one of them—whether they’re dead, down in Hades, or alive in Thebes—about this same topic as my morning class did—the purpose of life.

    Marcus: But they’re dead.

    Bob: We’re just imagining it. They all do have some hard-won experience, right? Imagine yourself talking to one of them. All right? … How about Antigone? What do you remember about her?

    Tawny: She’s dead.

    Bob: Yeah … What else? … Did we really forget the play over the weekend?

    Kaylia: (nods)

    Bob: Can anybody summarize it?

    Zeina: We have to summarize it?

    Bob: No … But can somebody just say what happens—in a nutshell, a tiny summary—so that we have that magic word “context” before we write? (Bob points at the word “context” at the board, from the lesson at the beginning of class time, when the six on-time students and he read Karl Ove Knausgaard’s essay “Conversation.”) Context, anybody?

    Tawny: Her brothers died.

    Bob: Yeah. And …?

    Tawny: She buried one of them.

    Ryann: But against the law.

    Bob: Right! Remember, guys? Let’s go back to Creon’s big speech near the beginning. That’ll remind us who he is and what he thinks of himself and the world. Ryann?

    Ryann: (reads Creon’s speech about “our Ship of State, which recent storms have threatened to destroy …”)

    Bob: What is Creon asking the citizens, the old men of Thebes, to do?

    Niege: Guard the body.

    Bob: He’s got professional soldiers for that. He asks them for one thing. What is it?

    Ryann: To stick with him.

    Olya: Loyalty.

    Bob: What’s that word, Olya?

    Olya: Loyalty.

    Juan: No matter what, you back them.

    Bob: Got it! Creon doesn’t need them for service. He needs them to support him no matter what he does.

    Tawny: They’re in his corner.

    Bob: Yes. He wants that assurance from them—and they give it. Do you think he knows he’s going to violate divine law? … Yeah, Paul?

    Paul: If we’re gonna write—

    Bob: We’re going to write.

    Paul: I forgot my pen.

    Bob Blaisdell teaches English at Kingsborough Community College.

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  • How Many Vice Presidents Does Any College Need? (opinion)

    How Many Vice Presidents Does Any College Need? (opinion)

    Amherst College, where I teach, recently changed the designation of its senior administrators, who were formerly called “chiefs,” as in chief financial officer, to “vice presidents.” We now have 10 of them, as well as 15 other individuals who hold titles such as senior associate, associate or assistant vice president.

    Not too long ago, in the time before they became chiefs, our VPs would have been called deans, directors or, in the case of our chief financial officer, treasurer. (Indeed, some retain a dean title along with their vice presidential one—the vice president of student affairs and dean of students, or the vice president and dean of admission and financial aid.) I respect and value the work that they do, regardless of their title. I know them and am aware of their dedication to the college and the well-being of its students, faculty and staff.

    But, for a small, liberal arts college that has long been proud to go its own way in many things, including in its idiosyncratic administrative titles, that’s a lot of vice presidents and associate and assistant VPs.

    Today, many of America’s colleges and universities are grappling with the issue of grade inflation. They are coming to terms with the fact that if everyone gets an A, as Christopher Schorr argues, “grading becomes a farce.” At the same time that grades have become inflated, another kind of inflation has affected our campuses.

    I call it the “vice presidentialization” of higher education.

    That trend is a sign of a shift in power from faculty to administrators, who are focused on protecting and managing their college’s brand. It is another sign of the growing administrative sector in American colleges and universities.

    Titles matter.

    For example, the title “dean of students” suggests a job that is student-facing, working closely with students to maximize their educational experience. The title of “vice president for student affairs” suggests something different, a role more institution-facing, dealing with policy, not people.

    Mark J. Drozdowski, a commentator on higher education, put it this way more than a decade ago: “Higher ed, as the casual observer might divine, is awash in titles.” He observes that for faculty, “The longer the faculty title, the more clout it conveys … Yet among administrators, the opposite holds true: president beats vice president, which in turn beats assistant vice president, which thoroughly trounces assistant to the assistant vice president.”

    “We’ve grown entitled to our titles,” Drozdowski continues. They “bring luster to our resumes and fill us with a sense of pride and purpose … Titles confer worth, or perhaps validate it. They have become a form of currency. They define our existence.”

    What was true when Drozdowski wrote it is even more true today. Administrative titles may “confer worth” on the individuals who hold them, but higher ed will not prosper if administrative titles define its worth.

    The multiplication of vice presidents and title inflation mark an embrace of hierarchy on the campuses where it happens. They may also signify and propel a division between those who see themselves as responsible for the fate of an institution and those who do the day-to-day work of teaching and learning.

    What was once designated a “two cultures” problem to explain the divide between humanists and scientists now may describe a divide between the cadre of vice presidents and the faculty, staff and students on college campuses.

    Having someone serve in the position of vice president at a college or university is not new, although the growth in the number of vice presidents at individual colleges and universities is. In fact, the role can be traced back to the late 18th century, when Princeton’s Samuel Stanhope Smith (son-in-law of the university president) became what the historian Alexander Leitch calls “the first vice president in the usual sense.” His primary duty was to step in when the president was unavailable. Yet, as Jana Nidiffer and Timothy Reese Cain note in their study of early vice presidencies, the position was not “continuously filled” at Princeton after that: After 1854, they write, “the role remained unfilled for almost thirty years and the title disappeared for more than a half-century.”

    Today, having a single vice president—or having none at all—seems almost unimaginable across the landscape of higher ed. Harvard University, for example, now lists 14 people as vice presidents in addition to the 15 deans of its schools and institutes. The University of Southern California has 13 vice presidents on its senior leadership team. Yale University lists nine vice presidents, as does Ohio State University. Emory University lists eight, and Rutgers University seven.

    The number of vice presidents at liberal arts colleges also varies significantly. Middlebury College has eleven. Dickinson College has nine, Kenyon College seven, Whitman College six, Goucher College six, Williams College three.

    And don’t forget Amherst’s 10 VPs.

    Those figures suggest that the number of vice presidents a place has is not simply a function of its size or complexity. The proliferation of vice presidents is driven, in part, by the desire of colleges and universities to make their governance structures legible to the outside world, and especially the business world, where having multiple vice presidents on the organization chart is standard operating procedure.

    And once one institution of higher education adopts the title of vice president for its administrative officers, others are drawn to follow suit, wanting to ensure that their leadership structures are mutually legible. The growth of vice presidencies may also help propel career mobility. How can a mere dean compete with vice presidents for a college presidency?

    More than a century ago, the distinguished economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen warned that “standards of organization, control and achievement, that have been accepted as an habitual matter of course in the conduct of business will, by force of habit, in good part reassert themselves as indispensable and conclusive in the conduct of the affairs of learning.” His response was to argue that “as seen from the point of view of the higher learning, the academic executive and all his works are anathema, and should be discontinued by the simple expedient of wiping him off the slate.”

    That is not my view. However, we have a lot to learn from Veblen.

    It would be a mistake for faculty and others who may be accustomed to the way things are done in banking or in other businesses to overlook the impact of the proliferation of academic executives on campus culture. It will take hard work and vigilance to make sure that the cadres of vice presidents on campuses govern modestly and that vice presidents don’t become local potentates.

    To achieve this, colleges must insist that their VPs stay close to the academic mission of the places where they work. This requires that we not allow our vice presidents to accrue privileges foreign to the people they lead and not escape from the daily frustrations that faculty and staff experience working in places where emails are not answered and nothing can get done without filling out a Google form.

    It may be helpful if our vice presidents leave their offices and interact with faculty and students on a regular basis. They should sit in on classes, visit labs and studios, and occasionally answer their own phones.

    Ultimately, even places like Amherst may be able to live with our own vice presidentialization—so long as those who have the title don’t take it too seriously and never forget that the business of education is not a business.

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

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  • Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Writing Labs Are an Answer to AI (opinion)

    Done! Finished!

    One might expect to hear such exclamations from exultant college students, relieved or ready to rejoice upon polishing off their latest essay assignment. Instead, these are the words I hear with increasing frequency from fellow professors who have come to think that the out-of-class essay itself is now done. It’s an antiquated assignment, some say. An outmoded form of pedagogy. A forlorn fossil of the Writing Age, a new coinage that seems all too ready to consign writing instruction to extinction.

    As a new director of my college’s faculty development office, I’m privy to ongoing conversations about the teaching of writing, many of which are marked by frustration, perplexity and pessimism. “I don’t want to read a machine’s writing,” one professor laments. “I don’t want to police student essay writing for AI use,” another asserts.

    Kevin Roose, a tech writer for The New York Times, who recently visited my campus, has suggested that the take-home essay is obsolete, asking, “Why would you assign a take-home exam, or an essay on Jane Eyre, if everyone in class—except, perhaps, the most strait-laced rule followers—will use A.I. to finish it?”

    Whether this situation is entirely new is arguable. For decades, we’ve had online resources that might make independent student reading unnecessary, yet we haven’t stopped assigning out-of-class reading. If I assign a rigorous novel like Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, I’ve long known that students can access an assortment of chapter summaries online—CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, LitCharts and others, all of which might make unnecessary the intellectual work of deciphering Dickens’s 19th-century sentences or wading into the deep waters of his sometimes murky prose. Maybe, as a recent New York Times piece about Harvard University students not doing their reading suggests, students aren’t doing that kind of homework, either.

    Still, being able to create sentences, paragraphs, essays and research papers with a single prompt—or now, having “agentic AI” engineer an entire research process in a matter of minutes—seems different from googling the plot summary for the first chapter of Bleak House.

    Maybe writing via LLMs is different because it’s not just about summarizing someone’s else’s idea; it’s about asking a machine to take the glimmer of one’s own half-hatched idea and turn it into a flawless, finished product. Somehow that process seems a little more magical, like being able to create a novel or a dissertation with a Bewitched-like twitch of the nose.

    Further, the problems with out-of-class writing are different from those linked to out-of-class reading because of how embedded AI has become within the most basic writing tools—from Microsoft’s Copilot to Grammarly. With tools that blur the boundaries between the student and their “copilot,” students will increasingly have difficulty discerning what’s them and what’s the machine—to the chagrin of those who do want to develop autonomous intellectual skills. As high school senior Ashanty Rosario complained in an essay in The Atlantic about how AI is “demolishing my education,” AI tools have become “inescapable” and inescapably seductive, with shortcuts to learning becoming “normalized.”

    In this world of ubiquitous AI shortcuts, how do we encourage students to take the scenic route? How do we help them see, as John Warner reminds us in More Than Words: How To Think About Writing in the Age of AI (Basic Books, 2025), that writing is an act of embodied thinking and a tool for forging human community, linking one human being to another? How do we encourage them, to use the language of Chad Hanson, to see their written assignments as “investments, not just in the creation of something to turn in on a deadline, but rather, investments in your humanity”? In an Inside Higher Ed essay, Hanson describes how he tells students, “When you give yourself time to use your faculties, you end up changing the dimensions of your mind.”

    But there’s the rub. Writing takes time. Teaching writing takes time. The practice of writing takes even more time. If there is still value in the time invested in developing human writing skills, where is the time to be found within the constraints of traditional writing courses? Writing practice used to take place primarily at home, on student PCs and notepads, over hours, days and weeks. Now that student writing is being chronically offloaded to a magical deus ex machina, Roose asks why teachers wouldn’t simply “switch to proctored exams, blue-book essays, and in-class group work”?

    As a writing professor, my answer is: There isn’t time.

    Shifting writing practice from a largely out-of-class endeavor to an in-class one doesn’t provide students with the time needed to develop writerly skills or to use writing as a mode of deep thinking. Nor does it allow for both instruction and sufficient hands-on practice. At my college, courses typically run either three days per week for a short 50 minutes per class or two days per week for 80 minutes. Even in a “pure” writing course, such time periods don’t allow for students to have the sustained practice they would need to develop skill as writers. The problem is even worse in writing-intensive courses for which a significant amount of class time is needed for discussing literary history, philosophy, political theory, religion, art history or sundry other topics.

    The solution I propose is to invest more rather than less in writing instruction: Just as we require labs for science lecture courses, we should provide required “writing labs” as adjuncts to writing classes. Here I don’t mean a writing lab in the sense of a writing center where students can opt to go for peer assistance. By writing lab, I mean a multihour, credit-bearing, required time during which students practice writing on a weekly basis under the supervision of the course’s instructor or another experienced writing teacher. Such labs would be time in which students develop their autonomous critical thinking skills, tackling assignments from conception to completion, “cloister[ed]” away, as Niall Ferguson puts it, from dependency on AI machines. And if writing “lab” sounds unduly scientific for the teaching of a human art, call it a weekly workshop or practicum. (Yet, even the word “laboratory” derives, via medieval Latin, from laborare, which simply means “to work or labor.”) Whatever the name, the need is real: Writing cannot be taught without student labor.

    The problem I am addressing is a critical one, with too few alarms being sounded in higher education circles, despite the plethora of articles about education and AI. Even as colleges tout writing skill as a major outcome of college education, I fear that writing education may quickly fall between the cracks, with out-of-class writing being abandoned out of frustration or despair and insufficient in-class time available for the deep learning writing requires. Quiet quitting, let’s call it, of a long-standing writing pedagogy.

    If colleges still wish to claim writing skill as an important learning outcome, they need to become more deliberate about what it means to educate student writers in the age of AI. Toward that end, colleges must first reassert the importance of learning to write and articulate its abiding value as a human endeavor. Second, colleges must devote professional development resources to prepare faculty to teach writing in the age of AI. And finally—here’s the pith of my argument—colleges need to restructure traditional models of writing instruction so that students have ample time to practice writing in the classroom, with a community of human peers and under the supervision of a writing guide. Only in, with and under those circumstances will students be able to rediscover writing as a true labor of love.

    Carla Arnell is associate dean of the faculty, director of the Office of Faculty Development and professor of English at Lake Forest College.

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  • SAT Requirements Should Be Aligned With Mission (opinion)

    SAT Requirements Should Be Aligned With Mission (opinion)

    The autonomy of states in setting their own higher education policies creates a series of natural experiments across the United States, offering insights into what approaches work best in particular contexts. Given the importance of local considerations, there are few universal policy prescriptions that can be recommended with confidence. Sadly, this complexity was overlooked in Saul Geiser’s recent Inside Higher Ed essay entitled “Why the SAT Is a Poor Fit for Public Universities.”

    My position is not that all, or even any, public universities should require standardized test scores. In fact, I share Geiser’s view that a university’s “mission shapes admission policy.” However, it is because of this principle that I contend that the SAT cannot be dismissed as a poor fit for public universities without considering how institutions operationalize their missions and define their institutional priorities.

    Vertical Stratification Within a Public University System

    In my view, Geiser’s argument is fundamentally flawed in his comparison of elite private institutions to public university systems, which often include an elite flagship campus alongside a broader range of institutions. Geiser’s comparison is particularly surprising given his long-standing association with the University of California system.

    The California Master Plan for Higher Education has long been studied and celebrated for establishing a public postsecondary education system consisting of institutions with differentiated missions and admission processes. Under its original design, the community colleges provided open access to all high school graduates and adult learners, offering a stepping-stone to the four-year institutions. The California State University institutions admitted the top third of high school graduates, focusing on undergraduate education and teacher preparation. The University of California institutions were reserved for the top eighth of high school graduates and emphasized research and doctoral education.

    By using high school class rank to sort students into the different tiers of the system, the Master Plan established a baseline for admissions to both UC and CSU institutions. This framework enabled the emergence of two elite public flagship campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles that prioritized academic excellence alongside accessible undergraduate institutions in the CSU system that served as drivers of economic development and social mobility.

    Reorienting the analysis to a comparison between elite public and private institutions would have provided a stronger basis for discussing selective admissions, as both of these institutional types receive far more applications than available spaces in their first-year cohorts. In these circumstances, institutions must make choices about how to differentiate among a pool of qualified applicants.

    It is common to start with assessing an applicant’s academic achievement. In a competitive pool, this assessment is less about whether the applicant meets minimum academic standards of the university and more about how the applicant has achieved above and beyond other applicants to the same program or institution. In a competitive admission pool, academic excellence is often an important distinction, but it can be defined in different ways.

    Assessing Academic Excellence

    Many researchers agree that the use of both high school GPA and standardized test scores yields the most accurate assessment of academic potential, rather than relying on either measure alone. Geiser’s own research from 2002 shows that combining both high school GPA and test scores better predicted UC students’ first-year grades than just high school GPA alone. Therefore, I was surprised that he presented the use of GPAs and test scores in admission policies as mutually exclusive alternatives.

    Although somewhat dated, a compelling finding from his 2002 analysis was that the combination of SAT Subject Test scores (discontinued in 2021) and high school GPA accounted for a greater proportion of variance in UC students’ first-year GPA than the combination of GPA and SAT scores. This finding suggests that precollege, discipline-specific achievement is important.

    This should come as no surprise, as college curricula for artists, anthropologists and aeronautical engineers differ substantially. It is reasonable to expect that the predictors of success in these programs would also differ. As such, academic programs within universities may be well served by setting admission standards calibrated to the specific competencies of their respective disciplines—a portfolio for the artist, an academic paper for the anthropologist and a math exam for the engineer.

    Although Geiser maintains that “academic standards haven’t slipped” at the UCs since they went test-free four years ago, a recent Academic Senate report from the University of California, San Diego, revealed that about one in eight first-year students this fall did not meet high school math standards on placement exams despite having strong high school math grades—a nearly 30-fold increase since 2020—and about one in 12 did not even meet middle school standards. This mismatch between GPAs and scores on course placement exams underscores critics’ concerns about inflation of high school GPAs and undermines the reliability of GPAs as a sole marker of academic achievement. The authors of the report called for an investigation of grading standards across California high schools and recommended the UC system re-examine its standardized testing requirements.

    It is understandable that faculty in quantitative disciplines, such as engineering and finance, would want to better gauge the readiness of applicants for their programs by considering test scores, if only the results from the SAT or ACT math sections, in light of these findings. However, if one in 12 students are not meeting middle school math standards, then the greater concern is that these students, regardless of major, will require remediation, creating longer, more expensive and more difficult paths to graduation.

    Variation in Standardized Testing Requirements Across States

    I was surprised Geiser did not acknowledge this report, instead arguing that the reinstatement of standardized test requirements at Ivy League institutions “provided intellectual cover for the SAT’s possible revival” nationwide. This characterization overlooks the fact that some public institutions in at least 11 states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia —already require standardized test scores in admission, according to the College Board. Notably, Florida public universities never suspended their test requirements during the COVID pandemic when all of the Ivies did.

    In Georgia and Tennessee, public universities waived test requirements during the COVID pandemic but subsequently moved to reinstate the requirements for the University of Tennessee system and for at least seven of the 26 institutions in the University System of Georgia, including the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Georgia.

    Among public universities in Texas and Ohio, only the states’ flagships, the University of Texas at Austin and the Ohio State University, reinstated standardized test requirements for all students. While the flagship in Indiana remains test optional, the state’s premier land-grant institution requires test scores—Purdue University reinstated the requirement in 2024. And in Alabama, both the land-grant, Auburn University, and the flagship, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, have announced plans to reinstate required test scores for all first-year applicants.

    In some states, public institutions, including Southern Arkansas University, Fairmont State University in West Virginia and Alcorn State University, a historically Black institution in Mississippi, waive test requirements for students with higher GPAs. In practice, this approach prioritizes performance in the classroom but offers low-performing high school students a second chance to demonstrate their proficiency and potential.

    These examples show how variations in admission practices across institutions enable public systems to pursue their missions and diverse sets of state goals that may not be possible for any single institution within their system. These systems can offer broad access to four-year programs while also upholding academic standards and pursuing academic excellence. Whether that means all, some or none of the institutions in a public system require the SAT or ACT depends on the goals and strategies of each of the states.

    While most public institutions adopted test-optional admissions during the pandemic, California implemented a test-blind policy that prohibited the consideration of test scores. Based on my experience as an admission officer, I applaud this decision. Test-optional admission is an easy policy decision, but I have seen how test-optional policies can create two different admission processes, where test scores are essentially required for some groups of students and not for others. Test-optional policies muddy the waters, offering less transparency in an already complicated process. The UC and CSU systems avoided this mistake by establishing equal grounds for evaluating applicants, but this does not mean that other public institutions need to do the same.

    Aligning Admissions With Mission

    Public universities are facing numerous enrollment pressures. Shifting state and regional demographics continue to force admission leaders to adjust their recruitment strategies and admission policies. The growing prominence of artificial intelligence appears apt to redefine the academic experience and admission processes, but exactly when and how are unknown. Meanwhile, the expected increase in states’ financial obligations in relation to Medicaid is likely to increase reliance on tuition revenue, which will ultimately shape the budgets and enrollments of higher education institutions.

    A uniform, one-size-fits-all approach to admissions policy, such as test-blind admissions for all public universities, does not respect the autonomy of states and institutions and does not serve the diversity of institutional contexts. Public universities should continue to tailor admissions policies to their specific needs, which may include variation across campuses within a public system or even among programs within the same institution. What matters most is that admission policies remain transparent, are applied consistently to all applicants within a program and closely align with the institution’s mission and public purpose.

    Ryan Creps is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo and was previously an admission officer at Brown University. His research focuses on college admission practices and postsecondary enrollment trends.

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