Tag: opinion

  • ‘I hate freedom of opinion’ meme leads to sentencing in German court

    ‘I hate freedom of opinion’ meme leads to sentencing in German court

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter. 

    Guilty finding for German editor’s doctored “I hate freedom of opinion” image 

    Germany’s speech policing can’t stay out of the spotlight for long, apparently. This month, David Bendels, editor-in-chief for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)-affiliated Deutschland Kurier, received a seven-month suspended sentence for “abuse, slander or defamation against persons in political life.” 

    The offense? Bendels had edited and posted a photo of Interior Minister Nancy Faeser so that a sign she held said, “I hate freedom of opinion.” (Just think of how many different versions you saw of the Michelle Obama sign meme here in the U.S.) A Bavarian district court found Bendels guilty under a provision giving advanced protections to political figures against speech. Bendels’ sentencing has provoked criticism outside of his political circle, with figures like former Green Party leader Ricarda Lang questioning the “proportionality” of the ruling.

    Political speech under fire, from Thailand to Zimbabwe to Russia 

    • American academic Paul Chambers, a Naresuan University lecturer, has lost his visa and is facing trial after the Royal Thai Army accused him of violating Thailand’s oppressive lese-majeste laws. The laws, which ban insults to the country’s monarchy, regularly result in long prison sentences for government critics.
    • Hamas militants tortured a Palestinian man to death after he participated in anti-Hamas protests.
    • A St. Petersburg military court sentenced 67-year-old Soviet-era dissident Alexander Skobov to 16 years in prison for participating in the Free Russia Forum and making a social media post in support of Ukraine.
    • Indian comedian Kunal Kamra is experiencing a wave of retaliation after joking about state leader Eknath Shinde at a comedy club. Kamra is facing multiple criminal charges, including defamation, as well as death threats. But he isn’t backing down — his response on X included a “step-by-step guide” on “How to Kill an Artist.”
    • Zimbabwe police have detained journalist Blessed Mhlanga for weeks on charges of “transmitting information that incites violence or causes damage to property.” He had interviewed a veteran and political figure who called for the resignation of President Emmerson Mnangagwa.
    • Israeli military temporarily blindfolded, handcuffed, and detained filmmaker Hamdan Ballal, best known for the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,”  while he was receiving medical care after settlers attacked him during Ramadan near his home in the West Bank.
    • Burkina Faso’s military junta is accused of forcibly conscripting journalists who criticized severe press freedom violations in the country.
    • Nigeria’s Borno State arrested a 19-year-old for his viral social media post criticizing public schools in the region and intend to charge him with “ridiculing and bringing down the personality of” the governor.
    • Lawyers representing dissenting voices aren’t free from consequences, either. An Iranian court sentenced a dozen lawyers who provided legal services to clients from the country’s 2022 protest movement to three years in prison on “propaganda” charges. 

    Turkey targets journalists amid protests

    Protesters gather in Istanbul after the detention of the city’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu.

    Last month, Turkish police banned protests in Istanbul and arrested the city’s Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu, a popular rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The crackdown has extended to the press, too. Authorities arrested BBC correspondent Mark Lowen and deported him for “being a threat to public order,” arrested AFP photographer Yasin Akgül for “taking part in an illegal gathering,” and charged Swedish journalist Kaj Joakim Medin for allegedly “being a member of a terrorist organization” and “insulting” Erdogan. 

    The latest in tech and censorship:

    • Late last month, a massive earthquake struck Myanmar, causing thousands of deaths and injuries. But the country’s military junta nevertheless continued severe restrictions on reporting and internet access, hampering recovery efforts.
    • The Kenyan high court in Nairobi ruled that a lawsuit alleging Meta’s content moderation practices fueled violence in Ethiopia can go forward.
    • Meta says it’s facing “substantial” fines because it “pushed back on requests from the Turkish government to restrict content that is clearly in the public interest” in the aftermath of Mayor Imamoglu’s arrest.
    • Turkish authorities also demanded the social media platform X block hundreds of accounts within the country, to which X partially complied but has since challenged some of the orders “to defend the expression of our users.”
    • X is also challenging the use of a provision of India’s Information Technology Act to issue content takedown orders.
    • India’s Supreme Court, in response to Wikimedia Foundation’s appeal against an order from the Delhi High Court, pushed back against that court’s demand that Wikipedia take down a page detailing Asian News International’s lawsuit against the Foundation.
    • The Investigatory Powers Tribunal issued a ruling opposing the UK government’s attempt to keep secret Apple’s appeal against orders that it offer a backdoor in its encrypted cloud service for users around the world.
    • European Union authorities are reportedly planning to announce penalties including “a fine and demands for product changes” against X for alleged violations under the Digital Services Act.

    Pakistan’s blasphemers still under attack

    Late last month, a Pakistan court sentenced five men to death for posting “blasphemous” content online, a common charge and penalty in Pakistan. But that’s not all. A Pakistani YouTuber is also facing blasphemy charges (not his first) for naming a perfume “295” — a reference to the blasphemy law in the country’s penal code.

    Let’s check back in across the pond…

    Lately, it seems not a day goes by without the UK’s free speech issues hitting the headlines. This month is no different. Here’s the latest:

    • As I’ve written about in recent editions of the Dispatch, the UK has been flirting with enforcement of blasphemy laws in the country. That risk has advanced with the charge of “intent to cause against the religious institution of Islam, harassment, alarm or distress” filed against a man who burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. The alleged target in the case — the “religious institution of Islam” — is notable.
    • On the other hand, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority chose not to act on hundreds of complaints filed over an allegedly anti-Christian KFC ad that “depicts a man being baptised in a lake of gravy before transforming into a human-sized chicken nugget.”(Last year, the ASA did act against a comedy tour ad that could cause “serious offence” to Christians.)
    • A lower court in Poole found anti-abortion activist Livia Tossici-Bolt guilty on two charges of breaching a public spaces protection order for standing outside an abortion clinic with a sign that read “Here to talk, if you want.” The court gave her a conditional discharge and ordered her to pay £20,000 (about $27,000) in legal costs.
    • Over 30 police officers arrested six activists from Youth Demand at a Quaker meeting house in London “on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.” One member said the group was “so incensed” by the raid “that they didn’t even offer officers a cup of tea.”
    • Hertfordshire police are conducting a “rapid and thorough review” after the arrest and 11-hour detainment of  a couple on various charges, including harassment and malicious communications because they voiced complaints about their daughter’s school on WhatsApp.
    • The aforementioned arrests are just a drop in the pond — data obtained by The Times found that UK police are detaining around 12,000 people annually for “sending messages that cause ‘annoyance’, ‘inconvenience’ or ‘anxiety’ to others via the internet, telephone or mail.”

    China’s critics targeted in Hong Kong — and Canada 

    Chinese dissident artists Badiucao

    Chinese dissident artist and human rights activist Badiucao holding his Lennon Wall flag that he designed in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, October 5, 2019.

    Milan digital gallery Art Innovation is facing criticism for its response to an artist it featured in a short video broadcast on billboards during a recent art fair in Hong Kong. In it, artist, CCP critic, and frequent target of censorship Badiucao mouthed the words, “You must take part in revolution,” a Mao Zedong quote and the title of his new graphic novel. 

    When he announced that he planned to publish a statement about his effort to skirt Hong Kong’s censorship laws, Art Innovation warned him there would “definitely” be legal action if material “against the Chinese government is published.” And in a social media post, the gallery said Badiucao was not upfront about the “nature of the work” so they “can consider it a crime.”

    And that’s not all the news out of Hong Kong. In recent weeks, a 57-year-old man was sentenced to a year in prison for “seditious” social media posts including some calling the Chinese government a “terrorist state” and an “evil axis power.” Police also took in for questioning the parents of U.S.-based democracy activist Frances Hui, who is wanted in Hong Kong on national security charges.

    Hong Kong’s campaign to target its activists is causing a stir elsewhere, too — in Canadian elections. Canadian member of parliament and Liberal Party candidate Paul Chiang stepped down from the April 28 election days after a video of comments he made earlier this year surfaced. In it, Chiang encouraged people to bring Conservative party candidate Joe Tay, who is wanted by Hong Kong authorities, to Toronto’s Chinese consulate to collect a bounty for him.

    P.S. If you enjoyed this newsletter, you may be interested in my book, “Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.” It comes out Aug. 19 and is now available for pre-order!

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  • How AI Challenges Notions of Authorship (opinion)

    How AI Challenges Notions of Authorship (opinion)

    Have you seen the Apple Intelligence writing tools commercial featuring a dim-witted office drone named Warren? Tapping away on his iPhone, he writes a goofy, slangy email to his boss and then has the app transform his prose by selecting “Professional.” The manager reads the resulting concise memo and, stunned at the source, asks himself, “Warren?”

    Warren has a ghostwriter. In fact, we all do.

    I’m hardly alone in thinking AI chat bots such as ChatGPT are a lot like ghostwriting. In an Inside Higher Ed blog post, “ChatGPT: A Different Kind of Ghostwriting,” Ali Lincoln, herself a ghost, finds nothing wrong with using AI to write an outline or even a first draft. After all, she argues, “in both writing and editing, we’ve used some element of AI for many years, such as software that evaluates the readability of a written piece, programs to check writing like Grammarly, and even spell-check and autocorrect.”

    An especially intriguing piece appeared in, of all places, Annals of Surgical Oncology: “A Ghostwriter for the Masses: ChatGPT and the Future of Writing.” The author, a physician, writes mostly positively of the potential uses of ChatGPT to assist in medical and scientific writing.

    Throwing this discussion into sharper relief, there is even Ghostwriter OpenAI ChatGPT, an add-in that embeds ChatGPT directly into Microsoft Office. With Ghostwriter, you simply open Word and have the chat bot on the same screen as your document—a ghost in the machine.

    These arguments and recent AI developments have caught my attention, because throughout most of my academic career I moonlighted as a corporate ghostwriter. I wrote magazine articles on scientific topics for a large technical company, articles that were published under someone else’s name, typically a scientist or engineer whom I interviewed for the piece.

    My favorite moment in that role came when I sat down with a manager who was new to the company to discuss a writing project. She handed me an offprint of an op-ed by the division vice president, accompanied by his photo.

    “Study this,” she said, a bit officiously. “Everything you need to know is in his article.”

    Maybe you see where this is going. Notwithstanding the VP’s smiling face, I’d written every word.

    Ghostwriting can lead to this sort of haziness about authorial authenticity. But is it unethical?

    Certainly, I didn’t think so. I produced what was essentially the voice of the corporation placed in the mouths of its subject matter experts (SMEs) and executives, who were either too busy or incapable of writing the articles. The company hoped readers would contact the SMEs to learn more; they weren’t interested in anyone talking to me. And I was happy to remain in the shadows (yes, with my check).

    I explained as much to students in my professional writing classes, where I focused on the business of writing, pointing out that CEOs are no more likely to write their own op-ed pieces than are U.S. presidents to write their own speeches. But they were nevertheless uneasy with the practice. They couldn’t imagine writing anything without getting a byline, even when I explained the concept of work for hire.

    Ghostwriting is a kind of imposture, presenting to the world writing that is not one’s own. Nevertheless, like the spirits for which it is named, ghostwriting exists in a shadowy realm where things are not what they seem. It inhabits an ethical twilight zone.

    Kathleen Hall Jamieson stated as much in her groundbreaking work, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking:

    “When students fail to acknowledge the sources from which their essays are drawn or, worse, when they expropriate the language of another, we righteously cry plagiarism and penalize them; once the student attains the status of senator, congressperson, or president, the rules change. Feigning authorship of another’s thoughts and words is then not only expected but publicly funded.”

    When Jamieson wrote those words, in 1988, she could not have foreseen how ChatGPT would make ghostwriting available to everyone, not just politicians and celebrities, making questions about its ethicality even more pressing.

    I plugged into Ghostwriter OpenAI ChatGPT and asked it to expound briefly on the ethicality of ghosting:

    “Ghostwriting is a contentious practice within the realm of ethics. On one hand, proponents argue that it is a legitimate form of collaboration, where the writer’s expertise brings another individual’s ideas to life. It allows busy or less skilled individuals to share their knowledge and experiences through the written word. However, critics argue that ghostwriting undermines authenticity and intellectual integrity.”

    This isn’t exactly an incisive analysis of the topic, but it’s not a bad start. Yes, ghostwriting is ethically contentious. However, and this is a crucial point, it allows “less skilled individuals to share their knowledge and experiences through the written word.”

    Of course, the person who turns to AI for these answers may not do any deep thinking about the topic—or any thinking, at all. And this is what we ask of writing, especially in the academic setting, that it serve as a way to wrestle with ideas and arguments, to write our way toward conclusions. Further, this is why the answer to the question “May students use ChatGPT to write essays?” must be a hard no.

    Still, we have to face the question of ghostwriting’s ethicality in other instances. When is it allowable? I think for practical, workaday writing chores, AI technology has already won out.

    When I began teaching professional writing some 40 years ago, I included instruction on putting together an effective memo. I did something similar in numerous training sessions I conducted for corporations. Today, with AI ghosts haunting every classroom and office, this sort of coaching would be like teaching a driver how to read a road map.

    Universities have long privileged writing, introducing students to the academic enterprise in freshman composition classes and making writing central to innumerable courses. Now, the primacy of writing skills is being challenged by the ghosts of AI. And not just for students: I cannot point to any data; however, my experience with colleagues suggests that faculty are using ChatGPT and other AI applications to assist in their writing. A draft journal article I reviewed recently included text stating the authors used ChatGPT to edit their manuscript.

    Kathleen Jamieson argued that the rules for authorial authenticity change when people become elected officials. Now they change when we have access to the internet.

    Ghosts are everywhere.

    Patrick M. Scanlon is a professor emeritus in the School of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology.

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  • Five Ways to Use Group Work to Engage College Students (opinion)

    Five Ways to Use Group Work to Engage College Students (opinion)

    A few years ago, we hired an adjunct professor to teach a three-hour night class. After a few weeks, he came to us in frustration because he couldn’t get the students to discuss the material, and when he asked if there were any questions, they never responded.

    We probed more. Upon further discussion, we found that his course plan for each night was a three-hour lecture using PowerPoint slides; he didn’t take class planning beyond that. He felt overwhelmed by the responsibility for teaching the content of the course, but he didn’t know where to begin to get the students to contribute, ask questions and actively participate. We immediately put on our coaching hats, working to help him actively engage his class so that students had a deeper learning experience.

    We have heard about this frustration with getting students to participate actively in conversations with many other faculty members, in one-on-one coaching or during faculty development sessions. This often happens because faculty members are relying on lecture because that was the way their own professors taught and often the way they were trained to teach in their graduate programs.

    When moving into team projects, here are four key actions to take:

    1. Assign students to their teams in a way that is transparent and purposeful. Definitely don’t let students pick their own groups.
    2. Show students your grading rubric when you assign the project. We guarantee your students will be more successful when you do this.
    3. Train students on how to conduct peer evaluation, and include peer evaluations as part of the grade.
    4. Check in frequently with teams to see how they are progressing, and to answer any questions. Your students will appreciate this.

    In addition, the distractions that students face when preparing for class and during class time are increasing exponentially. Many are not doing the reading, some are on their phones, more than a few are shopping online during class and some just don’t have the bandwidth left to participate because of their very busy lives outside of school.

    How do we help these faculty members start to turn things around? In our experience as professors, group work is a great way to help instructors, new and experienced, to actively engage classes in discussions.

    The two of us have had extensive experience using in-class group work and executing in-depth team projects across many different disciplines. On most surveys, employers report that one of the top skills they want from college graduates is the ability to work in teams. Given what employers want, we’d of course like everyone to move away from lectures to engaging students with project-based teamwork. But not everyone is comfortable moving to a system that is so different from their current teaching methods.

    So how can we help our struggling adjunct faculty member, and other professors who want to more actively engage their students? Here are five quick and easy ideas to try.

    1. A think-pair-share exercise. This occurs when you pose a question, give students a brief time to reflect and think, and then ask them to turn to their neighbor and share their ideas. If you want them to develop their thoughts even more, you can ask them to turn to another pair and join them to discuss the issue (how many times you do this depends on the size of the class); you can even join up more dyads. Then ask the groups to report back with a few key points.
    2. Prepared discussion questions. Prepare a series of discussion questions based on the reading for that day or about a problem on which the class is working. Next, organize the class into four- or five-person groups. Give students a reasonable amount of time to work through the questions. While they are working, make sure to circulate through the groups, answer questions, make comments to illustrate some of the ideas and provide prompts to help them. At the conclusion of the discussion, have each group report on the highlights of their discussion and use the opportunity to give a series of mini-lectures on points they described and things they might have missed.
    3. Learning through discussion. Developed by William Fawcett Hill, this method is an even more structured approach to group work. We used this method in an upper-level theory course with excellent results. Learning through discussion puts considerable responsibility on a group leader, but if the groups rotate this leadership position across the group each week, it should even out the work (and as a bonus, it can help students develop team leadership skills). The leader synthesizes the material and initiates the discussion. The leader doesn’t teach the group but leads them through an eight-step process to identify major themes in the material and how it integrates with previous knowledge and application. Keeping students in the same groups helps them get used to working together and develop a sense of camaraderie. If you find you need to hold students accountable to help some less motivated ones prepare, you can collect their notes and have the group do quick peer evaluations.
    1. Each one, teach one. These sessions are a great way to have students cover a considerable amount of literature in what might be a psychologically safe environment for them. Divide your class into groups of four to five people. Then assign as many readings as you have members of the groups. Each person in the group completes one reading and then leads a group discussion about the article, partially teaching it to the other members of the group. You can have them accomplish all the outside readings during one week, or across multiple weeks, depending on your needs. Students learn from each other, and the one leading the discussion has to spend time learning to dissect one paper. 
    2. Team projects. Ad hoc group work as we’ve described in the first four ideas is a great way to help students to learn course material for the long haul and spark discussion. Team projects can do this even better. They do, however, take a little more work. Once you are comfortable with breaking the class into groups for ad hoc discussion, you can think about planning a team project. If you’ve never run one before, you may want to start with a small project, something short term (think three to five weeks). As you gain more experience and learn what works for you, your style, and your material, you can then move to bigger, longer projects.

    These are just a few of the ways that you can use groups, or even teams, to actively engage students in the material.

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  • A Logical Gap Behind Attacks on the Humanities (opinion)

    A Logical Gap Behind Attacks on the Humanities (opinion)

    Researchers across the country who had been awarded prestigious grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities recently learned that their awards had been canceled. As Department of Government Efficiency reductions sweep through critical government agencies, higher education has been a clear target—not only through cuts at federal agencies like the NEH, but also through pressure levied on institutions like Columbia and Harvard Universities and, horribly, through Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainments that seem to take aim at politically engaged scholars like Rümeysa Öztürk. This targeting builds on decades of disinvestment—underfunding, fewer faculty lines and program closures—that have left humanities education fragile, and therefore vulnerable.

    But the arguments used to justify both the active dismantling and the long-term disinvestment fundamentally contradict each other. One argument imagines the humanities to be both powerful and dangerous, while the other sees humanities education as irrelevant and a waste of time. Both cannot simultaneously be true. The tension between them reveals the real driver: a pervasive fear of critical thought and the social change it may foster.

    As a humanities scholar who works with institutions nationwide to develop meaningful, equitable programs in higher education, I’ve watched countless colleges and universities grapple with the implications of this fear. Over the past decade, the claim of irrelevance has been used to justify budget cuts and program closures. Last year, Boston University suspended doctoral admissions to the humanities and social sciences. In 2023, West Virginia University eliminated numerous humanities programs and faculty lines—the cuts included all of WVU’s foreign language degree programs—with many other institutions considering similar measures.

    Those who support these actions tend to cite declining numbers of humanities majors as evidence that students don’t care about the subject matter, or that they think a humanities degree is a financial dead end. However, even the economic piece of this argument is not borne out by the data. Recent research from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences shows strong state-by-state employment trends for humanities graduates, with advanced degree holders earning a median salary of about $84,000. Their research shows that a remarkably high 87 percent of all humanities majors feel satisfied with their careers—and that percentage climbs to 91 percent for advanced degree holders.

    The rhetoric may be false, but it is nonetheless dangerous. It is true that humanities majors are trending downward—but why? We know that students do care about humanities topics. Every instructor I talk to reports high levels of student engagement in humanities courses. It’s not lack of interest, or economic realities, but intentional disinvestment that erodes the humanities and leads to program closures. That disinvestment serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as students invariably notice which parts of the university landscape are prioritized; it’s visible in buildings, in classroom spaces and in faculty offices. Students may hear messages from parents or from the media that nudge them in other directions. The resulting decreased enrollment fuels legislative actions and budget cuts that undermine the potential of humanistic inquiry and education.

    The other line of argument does not rest on the supposed irrelevance of the humanities, but rather their power—and in doing so, it negates the first argument. This is the logic that leads DOGE to demand that the NEH and other agencies stop funding projects that explore race and gender equity. It’s the logic that leads to the dismantling of the federal Department of Education. It’s the same logic that has led conservative groups like Moms for Liberty to try to get books about LGTBQ+ kids pulled from library shelves, that led state officials like Ron DeSantis to block the teaching of African American studies. Why bother to fight against these projects, books and courses if they don’t hold power? No: In these cases, critics know that exposure to the humanities has the potential to change our individual and collective thinking, to bring new perspectives into the light, and to loosen the hold of dominant perspectives on the social psyche. That, to many, is terrifying.

    The results of these critiques are profoundly damaging. The NEH cuts—paired with similar cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, where the entire staff has been placed on leave—threaten a whole generation of research and community-engaged practice and will leave us with a diminished cultural landscape and limited possibility to interpret what’s left. The Trump administration is already trying to control what is displayed in national museums, particularly those that highlight underrepresented artists. Local libraries and state humanities councils are losing critical operating funds. As books, art and culture disappear, we need scholars trained to ask why—but with humanities programs in shambles, who will be ready to do that work?

    Our cultural heritage is our nation’s portrait; there is power in seeing oneself represented in books, art and music. This is especially true for people who are marginalized in many social structures; broadly representative books on library shelves can be a lifeline for queer kids, trans kids, immigrant kids. Kids with names that white teachers find hard to pronounce. Kids looking for affirmation that, yes, they’re OK. Removing titles because of characters that share these identities is an act of erasure, a way of saying, no, actually, you’re not welcome here. Given that trans kids already have alarming rates of suicidality, the stakes are unspeakably high.

    The far right is correct about one thing: The humanities are powerful. It is through the humanities that we are fighting tooth and nail for democracy—which is why we must defend these institutions and the people who make them work. With a news cycle that is so rapid and confusing as to cause whiplash among even the most savvy readers, historians like Heather Cox Richardson and David M. Perry provide context that extends beyond our current time and place to help us collectively understand the patterns of the present moment—and, more importantly, to envision possible paths out. Artists provide solace and catharsis through pieces that express what words cannot, such as Chavis Mármol’s “Tesla Crushed by an Olmec Head,” which is exactly what it sounds like. These interventions matter deeply when our collective sense of reality is being threatened by outright lies from people at the highest levels of leadership.

    What we’re seeing now are the results of a systematic and structural push that has been slowly unraveling the humanities ecosystem for decades. But it needs to stop. The NEH cuts, the threats to education, the book bans, the program closures—and the rhetoric that brings them about—foreclose opportunities for students and for society. We are in a moment that requires stronger nationwide investment in the humanities, not their diminishment. Former NEH chair Shelly Lowe—the first Native American to lead the organization, unceremoniously pushed out by President Trump in March—urged participants at last year’s National Humanities Conference to find hope in dark times by turning to poetry. Riffing on Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy,” she urged us to “believe that further shores exist, even if they are out of sight.” Art and culture provide avenues for expression, beauty, understanding and meaning—especially when our world feels like it’s crumbling.

    The right knows the humanities are powerful; it’s time for the left to truly believe in that power, and to call out the hypocrisy driving the right-wing attacks on our shared cultural heritage.

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  • Some Rules for Campus Resistance (opinion)

    Some Rules for Campus Resistance (opinion)

    Given what’s happened at Columbia University (and what is happening now at other Ivies, and beyond), every university leader in the United States ought to be planning in advance what they will do when similar pressures are brought to bear on them. Academics ought to as well; all the citizens of our republics of learning should care about their institutions and be willing to defend them.

    Over a decade ago, here at the University of Virginia, we had a nasty little fight with our Board of Visitors when they tried to fire President Teresa Sullivan with little more logic or rationale than we’re currently seeing come out of Washington. (The American Association of University Professors produced a pretty good report about it, if you want to read something unsettling.)

    Our opponents in that little pas de deux had a degree of ignorance that amply matched their arrogance, but we were lucky in discovering allies far beyond Charlottesville in our alumni base and other institutions.

    At the time, I recognized that we had learned some smaller, tactical lessons in the whole shindig that might be relatively portable across different universities. I almost published them, but decided that it was better to let my university go forward without adding my two cents.

    Now, however, in our moment, these seem relevant again. So, in the wake of Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s assault, I dusted them off and polished them up. They didn’t need much polishing, to be honest. Consider this a small pamphlet for thinking about hosting “a little rebellion now and then” on your campus, when such is needful.

    1. Don’t start the fight. Have a prompting event—even if you invite it merely by doing your job. We were lucky to have a “day of infamy” jump-start our events in 2012. It was dropped, gift wrapped, into our lap. We were, from the beginning, in the position of the victim—the one who was wronged. Being the aggrieved party from the start helps. A lot.
    1. Be a big tent, but have one common aim. Because the misdeed was so expansive in its implications, the scope of our “we” was enormously wide. The “we” who was violated included not just the president, but the administration, faculty and staff—and not just them, but the students, and the alumni, and indeed the community of Charlottesville, and possibly all those interested in the future of academia in America and beyond. And anyway, you’re not seeking consensus: You’re seeking alliance. This is hard for us academics, because we are so excellent at invidious distinctions. But remember: World War II was won by an alliance of the British empire, the anticolonialist liberal United States and the definitionally revolutionary U.S.S.R. If those three states could work together, you can say something nice about professors in the business school, or vice versa. The same goes for deans and administrators: They are not the enemy. By coordinating the most expansive community as the community to whom voice could be given, we ensured not just that numbers were on our side, but that the widest set of complaints and grievances were brought to bear on the most precise targets.
    2. Lean into shared governance. No one ever expected the UVA Faculty Senate to be consequential, least of all the Faculty Senate. It was the place where we sent junior faculty “to learn about the university”; given how much import anyone normally gives to learning about the university, that shows you what we thought of it. But, to borrow from Don Rumsfeld, you go to war with the institutions you have, not the institutions you wish you had, and now everyone knows that the Faculty Senate can matter, and matter decisively. I hope we never forget it. I hope you can learn from our example and not your own.
    3. Tenure counts. You know that thing we say about tenure mattering for free expression and for ensuring that you can speak your mind on academic matters without getting fired by administrators who don’t like what you have to say? I used to find it annoying and silly— “of course that’s not going to happen, not today,” I thought; “no one will be so dictatorial.” Well, lookie here—I was wrong. The first and consistently most vocal group in the whole UVA fracas was the faculty. The staff members were behind us (especially the women on the university’s staff, who had felt represented by Sullivan in a powerful way), but obviously they were in the most vulnerable position. And the deans and administrators were by and large ready to accept the coup as a fait accompli. (While the deans of the various schools eventually came around, it took them some time; only after they realized that almost every last one of the faculty were extraordinarily pissed, and shopping their CVs around, did they realize that they were hurting themselves more by not saying anything than they would by saying something.)
    1. “If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower said that, and it’s true here. The prompting event of our crisis was of course the firing of our President Sullivan by our board rector, Helen Dragas, and a few others (let’s be honest about what it was and who did it). But it was clear from the beginning that there were larger issues here—about the disconnect between oversight, management and teachers and researchers, about the creeping “corporatization” of the board (though that does a terrible disservice to wise governance of corporations around the world, which would never be run the way most university boards try to run their institutions), about the failure of faculty to take seriously how the higher levels of the university were operating—matters far larger than simply this act. As the crisis developed, we realized we were reaping the consequences of structural contempt toward the faculty (and the rest of the university, really) by the Board of Visitors and a crisis of apathy about university governance on the part of the faculty. The problem may be larger than you first realize: Get it in focus, first and foremost.
    2. “Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” The idea that disputes of these sorts are amenable most basically to conversation is mistaken. Statements were continually communicated to our Board of Visitors, but we knew almost at once that argument was not our real weapon. Once you decide to dissent, the time for talk is over, at least with opponents such as these; they will not be amenable to conversation—not without a great deal of pressure from other forces and sources. Your aim is not to convince your opponents; your aim is to beat them. To do that, you must persuade potential allies, not actual enemies. That said, it never hurts to be reasonable and produce strong arguments directed at your opponents, so long as you know those arguments are largely valuable because they are overheard by others.
    3. At no point should you demonize or vilify your opponents. It weirdly invests them with power you need not bestow. You’re in a fight with someone who’s like a toddler—do not descend to their level. Speak calmly, as to a toddler having a temper tantrum. You won’t convince them, but you will demonstrate you are not afraid. That will upset them more. If they lose, of course they will say you did demonize and belittle them; they’ll call you “so mean,” “ungracious” and “nasty in tone.” Don’t worry; everyone else knows otherwise. Saying that may be their only consolation prize. Let them have it. You’re walking out with the Benjamins. Or, in our case, the Sullivan.
    1. Time is not your friend, but nonetheless, boil the frog slowly. In a delicious irony, the coup at UVA was reversed “incrementally”—a bad word for Rector Dragas, a good word for President Sullivan. Resistance to the coup began with some immediate disquiet from the faculty and a few students on campus when it was first announced. But the faculty knew from the beginning they wouldn’t be the material cause of any change; they needed more powerful allies. The momentum built slowly, then snowballed at the end. And the momentum built both inside the institution and outside it: inside, mostly by growing outrage at the trickle of information released and the little bit we could discover (or, more properly, the media could discover) over time, and outside, by the gradual but eventually approaching exponential expansion of numbers and kinds of UVA stakeholders who expressed outrage.

    The end of the first week saw the Faculty Senate meeting where 800 faculty and others listened as our provost, John Simon, expressed real and powerful concern, and subtle outrage, over what had happened and how it had happened. By the end of the second week, we had politicians, alumni, other university faculties—and a number of major donors—speaking out in outrage. And then, too, we began to see newspaper editorial boards—and Katie Couric—condemn the firing. Had the Board of Visitors waited a bit longer to reverse its action, no doubt the United Nations, the E.U., the Nature Conservancy, the NBA, al Qaeda and Justin Bieber would have issued statements.

    The lesson here? Don’t try to get everyone on board all at once. Trust the swarm method, but go through your list of stakeholders methodically—moving from the most swayable to the least so. Rank them in their “get-ability,” and then get them, encouraging the ones you already have on your side to increase pressure on the next-most-gettable ones. On day two of a crisis, you probably won’t get The Washington Post and your institution’s major donors to sign on to calling this an outrage; but by day 10, or 14, with a little help, and momentum from other people, you may. And better still, while this is happening, your opponents probably won’t notice the pressure gradually ratcheting up, as they are simply trying to keep responding to different constituencies. By the time they realize that there are a lot of people angry at them, there’s little they can do to quell the anger, except give in.

    1. Have a lousy enemy, and let everyone see that. Maleficence is usually associated with incompetence, and in the case of this episode, that was true. We were extraordinarily fortunate in our foe. The Kremlin-like silence of the Board of Visitors as the shock and anger mounted; the Politburo-like prose when the board decided to speak; the slow uncovering of the incredibly flimsy reasoning behind the decision, revealed in emails over the previous months; the remarkable stubbornness, coupled with utterly no sense of the appearance of absurdity regarding the irrationality of the stubbornness—it’s as if we couldn’t have had a better opponent for this fight.

    But it is important that what gets publicized is your opponents’ badness, not your contempt for them. Academics are really, really skilled at expressing contempt. Few of us realize it doesn’t make us look good, either in faculty meetings or on social media. You never win an argument by judging your opponents. Instead, let your opponents be seen for who they are.

    This is mostly out of your control, but it might be possible to imagine different ways of framing your opponent, so that different profiles of them emerge. In our case it was clear early on that it would be very important not to make this about the entire Board of Visitors but to focus on a small clique inside it so that pressure could be put upon the whole in such a way that some fractures would result; we hoped that such fractures, once they appeared, would quickly cause the whole to shatter. And they did: In the end Sullivan’s reinstatement was a unanimous board decision, the unanimity induced by the fact that the Dragas faction knew they had lost and quickly crumbled.

    Anyway, these are some things I think we learned. Best of luck if you get in a position to need them. You’ll need all the luck you can get. We certainly did. But, you know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. That was on a motivational poster I saw once. Occasionally such things are useful. If you don’t know what I mean, I fear you will soon.

    Charles Mathewes is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.

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  • How to Better Support Deans (opinion)

    How to Better Support Deans (opinion)

    Being a president is hard. Seriously hard. We are watching the rapidly increasing presidential turnover rate collide with the lack of formal succession planning at a time when higher education is under significant political pressure. This is a serious problem for higher education.

    But contrary to the popular perception, the president is not the sole difference-maker to an institution’s success. Once we look outside the spotlight of the presidency, we remember the institution’s core mission: academics. Skilled, effective academic leadership is vital to the ongoing success of an institution.

    Standing at the forefront of the academic mission is the provost. In case you are wondering what a provost does, they are, on paper, the chief academic officer, responsible for the vision and oversight of all academic affairs. As important as that sounds, Larry A. Nielsen, in his book Provost: Experiences, Reflections and Advice From a Former “Number Two” on Campus, describes the provost as the university’s “stay-at-home parent.” Not so glamorous.

    It is those leaders at the next level below the provost, the deans, who have responsibility for the vision and oversight of their respective colleges or schools. It is in these units where the bulk of the work happens for the academy to accomplish its mission, in research, teaching and service.

    In the current climate for higher education, where its value is being challenged and the fight for student enrollment is running high, the provost and deans hold the key to academic transformation, as they strive to make their institution a strong destination that changes students’ lives and opens doors to new careers. Additionally, the deans and their faculty are closer to the ground in terms of understanding what students and their communities need and want. They primarily shape which courses, programs, majors and minors are offered. They do this work. Not the president.

    This raises a question: What can be done to better support the deans?

    Deans operate at a critical transition point. They serve at the discretion of the provost and president, and, as such, take direction (or sometimes lack of direction) that comes down to them. At the same time, deans are serving and representing their faculty and staff, working to support their success in doing the actual work of educating, advancing knowledge and serving the institution as good citizens and stewards. This crunch between above and below brings a lot of pressure for deans, even in the best of circumstances.

    Thus, having coached and/or consulted with close to 100 deans over the years, I offer the following strategies.

    Give Them Resources and Get Out of the Way

    Being a dean is more closely aligned in its responsibilities to a presidential role than that of a provost. The dean oversees their school, with responsibility to set vision, create strategy, raise money, build and oversee administrative teams, manage politics, and drive results.

    What a dean is not is a “stay-at-home parent.”

    For deans to be most successful, the provost needs (to the best of their abilities) to provide deans with resources, professional development, time and clear direction. The provost (and at times the president) then needs to clear roadblocks, make introductions to key donors and stakeholders, and be available to the deans, as needed. You might say that the provost could consider the deans their most important constituents. If the deans are successful, it will greatly enhance the provost’s success.

    Allow Deans to Meet Alone Regularly

    Being a dean can be lonely. There is no one in their school to whom they can express insecurities or speak candidly, especially about sensitive issues. Providing space for the deans to meet and talk openly, candidly and even vulnerably with one another builds a group of trusted peers and advisers and creates a safe space to discuss challenges and give and get feedback from colleagues who may be experiencing the same.

    This process yields tremendous benefits for a campus, where challenges and opportunities across the schools can become aligned, resulting in better institutional decision-making, accountability and communication. The provost may think they should be in the room for these conversations (to hear what’s happening for the deans, to be helpful, etc.), but their presence limits the quality and openness of the conversations. If provosts want to be helpful, sponsor a monthly breakfast or dinner for the deans to meet alone. At a large R-1 where I have co-facilitated a new department chairs program for many years, the program has become affectionately known as “chairapy.” The same support could be provided for deans (deanhabilitation? I’m still working on a name for this one).

    Build a Team of Deans

    The deanship is an isolating role. The default setting for deans is to engage in turf wars with other deans, each jockeying for the attention and resources from the president, provost and CFO. As a result, many institutions fail to recognize how to leverage the deans as a true governing body on campus. Instead, both the provost and the president would benefit from investing their time and energy in supporting a deans’ council that has (as the Center for Creative Leadership proposes) shared direction, alignment and commitment. A unified team of deans allows for better decision-making, mutual support and resource sharing, as well as more consistent communication throughout the institution. Instead of fueling the common narrative of individual fiefdoms, invest in the deans as a team and reap the rewards of a better-functioning organization.

    Provide Deans With Information

    Deans like independence, running their shops with minimal interference. However, deans also need information and from all directions: above, below, across and outside. When information is lacking, rumors fill the void. Faculty will speculate, staff will complain or withdraw, stakeholders will wonder, “What is that dean doing, anyway?”

    To mitigate these issues, stakeholders need to share information and in particular, give the why, the context and rationale behind an issue. So if anyone wants to be helpful to their deans, overinform them and always include reasons why the information is important. If too much information is being provided, let the dean set the limits. And when a dean asks about an issue, please answer them (barring legal reasons not to). Don’t withhold. A dean left in the dark is only as good as the flashlight they have.

    Be a Thought Partner

    Deans attend a relentless number of meetings. As a client of mine once shared with me, “I have more requests for standing monthly meetings than there are hours in a month.” To avoid crushing deans with ineffective usage of their time, any meeting with them should be generative, one in which problems are being solved, decisions are being made, strategies are being forged and deals are being closed. Come to deans with solutions, with innovations and with energy. As the famous line from the film Jerry Maguire goes, “Help me help you!” Offer to be the dean’s thought partner, to stand (metaphorically) shoulder to shoulder and think through an issue together.

    Get Them a Coach

    As an executive coach, I recognize this one comes with my own inherent biases. And yet, I have seen firsthand the payoffs of providing executive coaching to deans. The return on investment easily justifies the financial cost. I do not wish to oversell this service. Just know it is super helpful—some might even say vitally.

    Ask Deans What They Need

    Finally, if you are not sure how to be helpful to a dean(s), ask them. They will know. A savvy dean, given the right mix of resources, support and collaboration, can accomplish great things, ultimately guiding their school to make the lasting impacts higher education so desperately needs these days: good news stories, student successes and positive contributions to their communities and country. A dean’s success can be a great counterbalance to the political side show that distracts from what truly makes the academy invaluable.

    Rob Kramer is a special adviser to the provost at Southern Oregon University, the former senior leadership adviser at the University of North Carolina’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and an executive coach and consultant in higher education and academic medicine.

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  • Ideas for Relationship-Building as Resistance (opinion)

    Ideas for Relationship-Building as Resistance (opinion)

    As Subini Annamma and David Stovall write in their February piece, “Standing Up to the New Segregationists,” “When universities stay silent or indicate their willingness to comply with executive orders that seek to dehumanize anyone who is not white, male and cisgender, they are sending a message.”

    We would argue that all of us in the system of higher education, on individual and collective levels, are sending messages with our action or nonaction at this moment. The past few months have been a period of chaos marked by rapid-fire executive orders, threats to college and university funding, and presidential edicts that undermine higher education’s fundamental values. The whiplash of ongoing executive actions and their judicial reversals is overwhelming, and the ground keeps shaking under our feet.

    Consistent with a traumatic experience (when events occur faster than our ability to cope), some of us may be experiencing a kind of trauma response, an instinctive response to a perceived threat. Most of us have heard about fight-or-flight modes, but it seems to be fawn and freeze responses that are playing out at many institutions across the country. The fawning response in higher education manifested in the form of anticipatory compliance in the face of threats to colleges’ federal funding. Diversity, equity and inclusion offices were jettisoned within a blink of an eye.

    We also are seeing some of our colleagues struggling with the task of revising position descriptions and scrubbing institutional websites, all while trying to support their colleagues who are most at risk. And there are many of us who don’t know what to do; feeling unsettled and fearful, we are just trying to make it through each day.

    Despite what is happening around us, we have to continue to attend to our work—to do all of the things that keep the institution running, to be in relationship with our colleagues and to be in classroom spaces with our students. We may be asking ourselves how we can show up in a meaningful way when our world is on fire, or how we can move forward when we feel so powerless.

    But if we do nothing, what does that say about our commitment to the essential promises of education—to the free exchange of ideas and academic freedom, to a belief in science and innovation, and, most especially, to our commitment to access, diversity and equity, which we know enhances the learning experience for everyone? Are these not the things that drew us to education in the first place?

    This moment is calling us back to our essential purposes—the deep relationships with students, the excitement of new ideas bubbling up and the sense of freedom that comes from the creation of knowledge in the context of community. It is time for us to get to work, to reclaim our spaces, to take a stand. We cannot wait for someone else to save us: We must save ourselves. And we do so through deep relationships within the context of community. As we have learned from bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire and Kimberlé Crenshaw, relationships will be our resistance.

    Relationships are not just the touchy-feely outcome of safe learning spaces: They are the foundation. And what better action can we take to protect ourselves and our communities from harm than by strengthening our foundation for this moment and what lies ahead? Fortunately for us all, whether you are an educator or institutional leader who has always prioritized relationships or one who is looking to strengthen your community as the ground beneath higher education rumbles and shakes, relatively small efforts (which is perhaps all we can muster) can reap far-reaching benefits.

    There are a myriad of brilliant ways to foster belonging, structure brave dialogue spaces and listen deeply to others, indeed, many more than we could possibly incorporate here. What we offer are some practical ways to grow and maintain an ethic of care and relational accountability. We hope this inspires simple ways for you to gather with others or maybe gives you permission to explore your own ideas for slowing down to the speed of relationship-building. What we share here are not new ideas, but they may have been forgotten.

    The offerings below span many cultures and have been practiced in one form or another by communities over time in response to oppressive regimes across the globe. We just have to recall the wisdom of our ancestors and employ some of their communal resistance strategies. They made sense of the world, grieved, resisted and found joy. So, too, must we.

    Notice and Name It

    “I believe we have a responsibility to create ways of understanding political and historical realities that will create possibilities for change. I think that this is our role, to develop ways of working through which, little by little, the oppressed can unveil their reality.” —Paulo Freire

    We can’t pretend that what is happening in the world doesn’t impact us, our students or their learning. Perceived and real threats of harm impede learning and development. In noticing and naming what is happening, we give ourselves and our students a means of coming to terms with it. When we name the fears and acknowledge uncertainty, we release a bit of the tension and welcome participants in all their experiences. This could involve a facilitator-led nod to the political climate, musings from the group of what they are holding in their minds, a meditative moment or a two-minute journaling activity in which students reflect on what they need to let go of in order to be present for the work ahead in class. These techniques can be just as helpful in meetings and other convenings of staff and faculty.

    In location-diverse, online environments, where you can expect a wide range of pressing matters, feel free to use or adapt this Acknowledgment Statement developed by emareena danielles and Deborah Kronenberg for a PODlive series on facilitation.

    Play: A Shortcut to Joy and Laughter

    Play and laughter are part of our ancestral languages, of our somatic ways of being. They exist across every culture to fuel us, nourish us and allow us to be more fully human. When was the last time you used your body or voice or language in a new way? How can you make space for a moment of play at the start of any group work or class, faculty development workshop, or community meeting? As easy as making a sound and movement, drawing with your nondominant hand, appropriating a childhood game toward a collective goal, or engaging in gibberish conversations, the small, silly risk will lead to a room (virtual or otherwise) of laughter.

    The collective release of emotion through play creates a community poised to dig into the work with joy and openness and gives us a reference point of when we took a risk, went with the flow and practiced resilience. For a great resource, Moving Beyond Icebreakers by Stanley Pollack with Mary Fusoni not only has a plethora of games to try but teaches facilitators how to use the games as metaphors for the work ahead. You may also want to check out Professors at Play for a more in-depth discourse.

    Tell Stories

    “We tell stories because we are human. But we are also made more human because we tell stories. When we do this, we tap into an ancient power that makes us, and the world, more of who we are: a single race looking for reasons, searching for purpose, seeking to find ourselves.” —Amanda Gorman

    Storytelling is a tradition that transcends cultures and communities and helps us make meaning of experiences. Nothing creates a connection between two people quite like sharing real stories from their own experiences and making meaning of the ideas together. A brief pair storytelling activity or a full Story Circle process holistically engages us all, pulling more of ourselves into the room. Stories activate our deep listening capacity, build authentic connections and remind us of why we are here in this moment, doing this work.

    Gather Together

    “I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning into what brings aliveness into our systems and being able to access personal, relational and communal power.” —adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism

    When we are exhausted and overwhelmed, it is easy to isolate. But as the news headlines continue to keep us in a state of constant upset and tension, we can choose to pull away from our individual screens as a means of resistance, as a conscious choice to be our full selves and band together with others. Whether through synchronized movie nights, local stitching circles or open mikes, coming together builds our relationships and positively impacts our communities’ efficacy. At College Unbound, students, faculty and staff kick off our in-person classes by breaking bread together to settle into our beautiful community before the academics begin. Gather however and whenever you can and know you are generating power by doing so.

    Self-Care

    As facilitators of relationships, of learning, of change-makers, we also have to care for ourselves. Here, we are not talking about indulging oneself with the luxury of a spa day. We are talking about the radical practice of taking care, slowing down and saying no to productivity as an indicator of self-worth. We can also care for ourselves through connection with peers both within and outside the field of education. We can prioritize our own joy, however that comes, and know that our rest is resistance, too (check out Tricia Hersey’s work).

    Resistance is needed now and mercifully comes in many forms. It might show up in marches and protests, but it can also be found in discovering what is within our locus of control and reclaiming our own agency. Our facilitation of spaces that build a sense of agency for students, staff and ourselves in solidarity can grow power.

    The antidote to oppression can be found in these glimpses of liberation, in spaces where we are unafraid and can imagine a more just world. In this context, we also build up our reserves for the journey toward the future we seek to manifest.

    If we can take a moment away from the chatter and from the bombardment of headlines meant to cause chaos, we can tap into our collective histories and remember: We know how to do this. Let’s recognize all the work we are already doing, the embedded relationship-building that has sustained us until now. And let’s continue to do the work that brought us to these educational spaces. The relational work we foster is the bedrock for the world we need to create together.

    Sylvia C. Spears is serving as provost and Distinguished Professor of Education, Equity and Social Justice at College Unbound, a small, private degree-completion college focused on adult learners.

    Deborah Kronenberg is an educator, consultant and public speaker who approaches communities of learning with creative, interdisciplinary, relationship-centric leadership in faculty and administrative roles in the greater Boston area.

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  • Some DEI Programs Are Vulnerable, Not Illegal (opinion)

    Some DEI Programs Are Vulnerable, Not Illegal (opinion)

    The Trump administration’s directives on diversity, equity and inclusion have wreaked havoc across the higher education landscape. Confusion persists about whether all DEI activities are forbidden or just ones that are officially illegal. To top it off, there’s much bewilderment about what exactly constitutes an “illegal DEI” activity.

    The ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. When people are confused about what’s legal or not, they’ll overcorrect out of fear. As a result, we see colleges and universities scrubbing DEI websites and cutting diversity-related programming. The outcome? A hasty, often over-the-top retreat from efforts that serve students and faculty alike.

    Critically, some of the programs deemed illegal by the Trump administration have not been ruled unlawful in the courts, such as scholarships and prizes that consider race or ethnicity in the selection process. The more accurate term to describe them is “vulnerable” rather than “illegal.” In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court specifically struck down a form of race-conscious admissions. While a court technically could apply SFFA in the future to render consideration of race in scholarships and recruitment efforts illegal, that day has yet to come, despite the current administration’s faulty interpretation of the ruling.

    Even Ed Blum, who organized the SFFA lawsuits, acknowledges this distinction, as reported in Inside Higher Ed: “Blum doesn’t actually believe the [SFFA] decision itself extends to those programs [e.g., race-conscious scholarships, internships or pre-college programs]. He does think they’re illegal—there just hasn’t been a successful case challenging them yet.”

    “I haven’t really made myself clear on this, which is my fault,” Blum told Inside Higher Ed in February, “but the SFFA opinion didn’t change the law for those policies.”

    So what does that mean for colleges and universities? The fuzziness over the legality of traditional race-conscious scholarships and recruitment programs will remain until the question is decided by the courts. While the majority ruling in SFFA led some to assume that all race-conscious programs will be deemed unconstitutional, the outcome is unknown. Courts could view the stakes or dynamics of nonadmissions programs (e.g., scholarships, outreach) as differing enough from the hypercompetitive context of selective college admissions to allow continued consideration of race. Institutions and organizations could also argue that race-conscious programs are needed to address specific, documented historic discrimination. This argument is different from defending race-conscious initiatives due to broad societal discrimination, as noted by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

    Likely, many institutions and organizations will move away from using race/ethnicity in the selection process for scholarships and other nonadmissions programs, out of fear of litigation and threats of federal funding being withdrawn. However, they may retool selection processes to consider factors related to their missions and goals, such as prioritizing those who show a commitment to supporting historically underserved populations. Further, if the ruling in SFFA is going to be used to attack nonadmissions programs, we can’t forget that it also affirms the right of programs to consider individuals’ experiences related to race. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

    The Ph.D. Project, the focus of Title VI investigations by the Department of Education, is an example of a program that was, in prior iterations, vulnerable but not necessarily illegal. The department announced last month that it had launched investigations of 45 universities over their partnerships with the Ph.D. Project, alleging that the nonprofit, which offers mentorship, networking and support for prospective Ph.D. candidates in business, “limits eligibility based on the race of participants.”

    The Ph.D. Project has already said that it changed its eligibility criteria earlier this year to be open to anyone who “is interested in helping to expand and broaden the pool of [business] talent”—so what will become of the investigations? Quite possibly, the Education Department will accuse institutions of breaking the law for partnering with an outreach program that in prior iterations considered race in its selection process—which is how the department likes to interpret SFFA, but that is still unsettled legal territory. Courts likely won’t hear a case on the Ph.D. Project because the program has already changed its selection criteria, so we still won’t know whether it’s legal or not to consider race in outreach programs. Until that question goes to court, we’ll probably have institutional decision-making driven more by the chilling effects of the Title VI investigations as opposed to actual law.

    While programs that consider race in selection criteria are vulnerable, there are plenty of diversity-related programs and initiatives that are not, or should not be as long as they are open to all students. Programs like speaker series, workshops, lunch and learns, training programs, cultural events, resource websites, racial/ethnic or culturally focused student organizations, administrative infrastructure, and task forces related to advancing a more supportive and inclusive environment—all of these can continue to play a critical part in advancing an institution’s mission and goals.

    In spite of this, the Trump administration recently proclaimed that DEI programs fuel “division and hatred” and ordered Harvard to “shutter such programs.” However, in previous communications, even the Trump administration has recognized that common DEI initiatives “do not inherently violate federal civil rights laws,” as noted by a group of leading law faculty. The directive to Harvard is serious overreach on multiple levels. We can only hope that Harvard will not capitulate to the administration’s demands and will defend its rights as an institution.

    Over all, institutions must resist panic-driven overcorrections. When vulnerable programs are threatened, institutions with the resources to do so should defend them in court. In other circumstances, retooling programs, rather than eliminating them, may be necessary. Institutions should not abandon diversity, equity and inclusion efforts out of fear; instead, they should seek to support diversity both lawfully and well.

    The Trump administration’s strategy is clear: sow doubt and encourage institutions to retreat. Instead of gutting diversity-related efforts wholesale, institutions need to take a more thoughtful approach. Our students depend on it, and so does the future of education.

    Julie J. Park is a professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park, and served as a consulting expert on the side of Harvard College in SFFA v. Harvard. She is the author of the upcoming book Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: A New Era in College Admissions, as well as two other books on race-conscious admissions.

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  • Why History Instruction is Critical for Combating Online Misinformation – The 74

    Why History Instruction is Critical for Combating Online Misinformation – The 74

    Can you tell fact from fiction online? In a digital world, few questions are more important or more challenging.

    For years, some commentators have called for K-12 teachers to take on fake news, media literacy, or online misinformation by doubling down on critical thinking. This push for schools to do a better job preparing young people to differentiate between low- and high-quality information often focuses on social studies classes.

    As an education researcher and former high school history teacher, I know that there’s both good and bad news about combating misinformation in the classroom. History class can cultivate critical thinking – but only if teachers and schools understand what critical thinking really means.

    Not just a ‘skill’

    First, the bad news.

    When people demand that schools teach critical thinking, it’s not always clear what they mean. Some might consider critical thinking a trait or capacity that teachers can encourage, like creativity or grit. They could believe that critical thinking is a mindset: a habit of being curious, skeptical and reflective. Or they might be referring to specific skills – for instance, that students should learn a set of steps to take to assess information online.

    Unfortunately, cognitive science research has shown that critical thinking is not an abstract quality or practice that can be developed on its own. Cognitive scientists see critical thinking as a specific kind of reasoning that involves problem-solving and making sound judgments. It can be learned, but it relies on specific content knowledge and does not necessarily transfer between fields.

    Early studies on chess players and physicists in the 1970s and ’80s helped show how the kind of flexible and reflective cognition often called critical thinking is really a product of expertise. Chess masters, for instance, do not start out with innate talent. In most cases, they gain expertise by hours of thoughtfully playing the game. This deliberate practice helps them recognize patterns and think in novel ways about chess. Chess masters’ critical thinking is a product of learning, not a precursor.

    Because critical thinking develops in specific contexts, it does not necessarily transfer to other types of problem-solving. For example, chess advocates might hope the game improves players’ intelligence, and studies do suggest learning chess may help elementary students with the kind of pattern recognition they need for early math lessons. However, research has found that being a great chess player does not make people better at other kinds of complex critical thinking.

    Historical thinking

    Since context is key to critical thinking, learning to analyze information about current events likely requires knowledge about politics and history, as well as practice at scrutinizing sources. Fortunately, that is what social studies classes are for.

    Social studies researchers often describe this kind of critical thinking as “historical thinking”: a way to evaluate evidence about the past and assess its reliability. My own research has shown that high school students can make relatively quick progress on some of the surface features of historical thinking, such as learning to check a text’s date and author. But the deep questioning involved in true historical thinking is much harder to learn.

    Social studies classrooms can also build what researchers call “civic online reasoning.” Fact-checking is complex work. It is not enough to tell young people that they should be wary online, or to trust sites that end in “.org” instead of “.com.” Rather than learning general principles about online media, civic online reasoning teaches students specific skills for evaluating information about politics and social issues.

    Still, learning to think like a historian does not necessarily prepare someone to be a skeptical news consumer. Indeed, a recent study found that professional historians performed worse than professional fact-checkers at identifying online misinformation. The misinformation tasks the historians struggled with focused on issues such as bullying or the minimum wage – areas where they possessed little expertise.

    Powerful knowledge

    That’s where background knowledge comes in – and the good news is that social studies can build it. All literacy relies on what readers already know. For people wading through political information and news, knowledge about history and civics is like a key in the ignition for their analytical skills.

    Readers without much historical knowledge may miss clues that something isn’t right – signs that they need to scrutinize the source more closely. Political misinformation often weaponizes historical falsehoods, such as the debunked and recalled Christian nationalist book claiming that Thomas Jefferson did not believe in a separation of church and state, or claims that the nadir of African American life came during Reconstruction, not slavery. Those claims are extreme, but politicians and policymakers repeat them.

    For someone who knows basic facts about American history, those claims won’t sit right. Background knowledge will trigger their skepticism and kick critical thinking into gear.

    Past, present, future

    For this reason, the best approach to media literacy will come through teaching that fosters concrete skills alongside historical knowledge. In short, the new knowledge crisis points to the importance of the traditional social studies classroom.

    But it’s a tenuous moment for history education. The Bush- and Obama-era emphasis on math and English testing resulted in decreased instructional time in history classes, particularly in elementary and middle schools. In one 2005 study, 27% of schools reported reducing social studies time in favor of subjects on state exams.

    Now, history teachers are feeling heat from politically motivated culture wars over education that target teaching about racism and LGBTQ+ issues and that ban books from libraries and classrooms. Two-thirds of instructors say that they’ve limited classroom discussions about social and political topics.

    Attempts to limit students’ knowledge about the past imperil their chances of being able to think critically about new information. These attacks are not just assaults on the history of the country; they are attempts to control its future.

    This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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  • Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions at Work (opinion)

    Growing Orchids Amid Dandelions at Work (opinion)

    Many of us working in higher education, including those of us in teaching and learning centers, might find that our work is dramatically accelerated by rapid technological change and increasing pressures to be more efficient and productive. Technology adoptions such as smartphones and Slack, video communication, and now generative AI all contribute to the acceleration of the organizational culture.

    In her recent essay “Teaching Centers Aren’t Dumping Grounds,” Kerry O’Grady argues that many academic leaders “focus on more instead of on effectiveness and efficiency.” O’Grady recounts continued calls to “create more workshops, more one-pagers or more training when attendance was dismal for initial sessions, or when the original documents went untouched.” She argues that educational developers are in a constant state of emergency response, in which they are tasked with “retroactive cleanup” as opposed to “the work of proactive planning for teaching and learning success.” O’Grady calls for a much-needed reset—something that feels wonderfully exciting—and institutionally unrealistic.

    Our collective teaching and working in higher education at more than 20 institutions over 50 years tells us that we are always working with limited agency to significantly change how our centers align with our strategic vision and the changing needs of the institution. Amid the dizzying pace of constant disruption, we feel a need to find a more sustainable and pragmatic approach. O’Grady’s essay inspired us to reflect on our strategic plans and how we support our respective communities. While the “dumping ground” metaphor importantly calls attention to current challenges, we consider a different metaphor that has guided our decisions as we direct centers and support educators.

    The Dandelion and the Orchid

    Dandelions are versatile flowers—resilient, fast-growing and abundant. In the context of educational development, dandelions represent the many ways developers adapt to institutional demands, producing quick outputs that propagate widely. Dandelion work is essential: It includes the programs and resources we create rapidly to meet pressing needs. However, as with real dandelions, the results of this work are often scattered, growing without the intentional design of a cultivated garden. When we run from meeting to meeting or throw together a one-off workshop to respond to emerging pedagogical issues, we rely on dandelions.

    In contrast, orchids require significant care and controlled environments to flourish. Orchid work symbolizes slow, intentional cultivation—projects that are thoughtfully nurtured over time. These efforts demand patience, consistency and a commitment to depth over breadth. While the process is slower, the results are uniquely meaningful, reflecting a product of deliberate focus. Orchid work requires long-term planning, collaboration across units and thoughtful engagement. While orchids can result in beautiful landscapes, the time taken to cultivate them can mean that we miss many emergent day-to-day needs.

    Together, this framework highlights a central question: Which systemic issues require sustained effort, and which challenges can be addressed through quick, one-off engagements? Balancing dandelion and orchid approaches helps educational developers respond to immediate needs while creating space for intentional growth.

    Growing Relationships

    Resilience does not sprout in isolation but through networks of care, mutual support and shared experiences. To push the floral metaphor further, if our goal in centers for teaching and learning is to help educators help students bloom, then we need to model and promote the space and time needed to learn, even if social pressures point in the opposite direction.

    Although meaningful relationships take time to develop, their benefits are powerful. Research supports the idea that individuals with a high relational self-construal—those who define themselves through their relationships with others—may be better able to embrace inconsistency and instability (two things that very much describe life in education today). Educational developers therefore can foster resilience and adaptability not only by caring for relational networks at their institution but also by defining their work based on such networks.

    In our own ways, we make space for orchids in our work and programming by emphasizing the ways in which relationships and time are necessary conditions for educational development. Some of the ways we do this as we go about our regular, day-to-day “dandelion” programming include:

    Balancing the orchid and the dandelion depends on priorities and time constraints. The dandelion approach can produce quick solutions when the pressure is high, and the orchid approach encourages us to carve out the time and tend to our relationships even in our constant push to maintain that field of flowers.

    While it may disrupt our metaphor, dandelions can give way to orchids and orchids can give way to dandelions. After all, the more often that deeper relationships develop, the more often we’re going to be in contact with faculty and colleagues, which will seed new ideas and possibilities, be they orchids or dandelions.

    The metaphor encourages us to ask how and where we can make space and time for deeper engagement. We cannot just grow a field of dandelions if we want to foster a culture of innovation, nor can we respond effectively and in a timely manner to an institution’s needs if we just focus on orchids. We have found that giving ourselves the permission to grow orchids amid the dandelions allows us to feel more agency and more relationally connected to the work we’re doing and the people we’re doing it with. The metaphor has helped us foster and model a more inclusive, supportive academic culture—one that balances collaboration with efficiency, collective resilience with institutional responsiveness and meaning with productivity.

    JT Torres directs the Houston H. Harte Center for Teaching and Learning at Washington & Lee University.

    Lance Eaton is an educator, writer and public speaker. He has worked in educational development for 15 years and recently became the senior associate director of AI in teaching and learning at Northeastern University.

    Deborah Kronenberg is an educator, consultant and public speaker who approaches communities of learning with creative, interdisciplinary, relationship-centric leadership in faculty and administrative roles in the greater Boston area.

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