Tag: opinion

  • Cultivating a Postdoc Community (opinion)

    Cultivating a Postdoc Community (opinion)

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

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

    Why Community Matters

    Looking to expand our support for postdocs beyond their professional development, we at the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis embraced the need to prioritize postdoc well-being and the creation of an inclusive, engaged community. We believe postdocs who feel a sense of belonging to a supportive environment are more likely to:

    • Maintain a healthier work-life integration, leading to better research outcomes, productivity and professional growth.
    • Reflect on their career paths, plan their future goals and make informed decisions about their careers.
    • Develop transferable skills such as communication, teamwork and leadership, which are crucial for career success.
    • Stay at their institutions, avoiding disruptions in research projects or the research group’s morale.

    With these objectives in mind, the skill-development side of the postdoctoral experience needs to be complemented with considerations about postdoc well-being, sense of belonging and identification with the institution.

    Initiatives to Cultivate Community

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

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

    Programming: Moments that Matter

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

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

    Fun Giveaways: Small Tokens, Big Meaning

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

    Communication: Making Sure No One Misses Out

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

    Call for Action

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

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

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

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

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

    Source link

  • Supreme Court Must Not Undermine Public Education in Religious Charter Case – The 74

    Supreme Court Must Not Undermine Public Education in Religious Charter Case – The 74


    Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    Last week, the Supreme Court held oral arguments in a case that could undermine public education across America. The question the court is looking to answer is whether a religious institution may run a publicly funded charter school — a move that would threaten not only the separation of church and state, but the right of every student to access free, high-quality learning.

    In 2023, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, an action that would make it the nation’s first-ever religious charter school. It would be governed by Catholic religious doctrine in its syllabus, operations and employment practices. It would use taxpayer dollars to pay for religious instruction. And it could turn away students and staff if their faith or identity conflict with Catholic beliefs. 

    Here’s the issue: Charter schools were created to be public schools. They are open to all students, from every background, tradition and faith community. They are publicly funded and tuition-free. And they are secular. 

    That’s not an arbitrary distinction – it’s a constitutional one, grounded in the law and embedded in charter schools’ very design. The First Amendment’s Establishment Clause bars the government from promoting or endorsing any religion through public spaces or institutions. This foundational rule has ensured that students of all backgrounds can access public schools. It does not stifle religious expression — the Constitution fully protects this freedom, and religious education is available in other venues. Personally, I was, in fact, educated at Jesuit Catholic schools for my entire academic career. 

    Parochial education has long been an accepted and important part of the education ecosystem, serving a variety of students and often filling an important need. Religiously affiliated schools have a long history of educating and caring for children who are new to this country and underserved, and supporting families who are overlooked. But promoting the exclusive teachings of a specific religion with public funds in a public school violates a clear constitutional principle. 

    The issue isn’t only a legal matter; it’s about the character of public education itself. Muddying the boundary between public and religious institutions would undercut a fundamental commitment made by the nation’s public charter schools: that they are accessible to every student. It would undermine legal protections that keep public services available to the public. 

    Rather than creating more opportunities for America’s students, it would constrict opportunities for a high-quality education, especially in states that are hostile toward charters or alternative public school models. Legislative bodies could seek to eliminate funding for all unique school types if the court decision forced them to fund religious schools operating with public dollars. This would curtail or dismantle strong independent schools, 30-year-old public charter schools and schools with unique programs designed for special populations.

    As executive director of the DC Charter School Alliance, and a long-time public charter school advocate, I’ve seen the importance of public charter schools firsthand. Here in the District of Columbia, charter schools serve nearly half of the public school students in the city. Outstanding educators from all walks of life teach a wide range of subjects with enthusiasm and expertise to prepare young people for success. Our students bring to the classroom an incredible range of experiences, including faith traditions. And every student, family and faculty member is welcome. D.C.’s charter schools reflect a core American value: the promise of a high-quality public education for all. 

    The justices of the Supreme Court face a clear and critical choice: They can bolster that promise, or they can tear it down. If the court allows a religious school to operate with public funds, there is no doubt that it will open the floodgates to other proposals across the country. Taxpayers could be forced to foot the bill for countless new and converted schools, draining resources from an already financially strapped education system. True public charter schools — the ones committed to high standards, positive results and opportunity for all — could bear the cost. And the students who rely on them could suffer. 

    Public education is one of America’s most vital institutions. It offers all children, no matter their background or beliefs, access to free, high-quality learning. Charter schools play an essential role in making that promise real. But allowing a religious school to operate with public funds turns public education into something much more restrictive, dismantling its very foundation.

    The court must reaffirm this indisputable truth: Public schools should remain public — and open to all. 


    Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

    Source link

  • Don’t Overlook Alumni as Asset for Advocacy (opinion)

    Don’t Overlook Alumni as Asset for Advocacy (opinion)

    With research contracts, cost recovery and student financial aid totaling billions of dollars on the line, many universities have called upon powerhouse external lobbying firms to defend against federal funding cuts and make the case for the public good that flows from higher education. Engaging external government relations experts can bring important perspective and leverage in this critical period, but this approach may not be scalable or sustainable across the nearly 550 research universities in large and small communities across the country.

    Fortunately, campuses have their own powerful asset for advocacy: alumni. Graduates know firsthand the benefits of higher education in their lives, professions and communities, and they can also give valuable feedback as campuses work to meet the challenges of this moment and become even better. The National Survey of College Graduates estimates that 72 million individuals hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Engaged well, alumni can be a force multiplier.

    Alumni often get attention in their role as donors. They will receive, on average, more than 90 email messages from their alma mater this year, many asking them to reflect on the value of their college experience and pay it forward. The most generous donors will be celebrated at events or visited personally by campus leaders. Millions and sometimes billions of dollars will be raised to advance campus missions.

    As generous as alumni donors may be, the effectiveness of their philanthropic support is linked to the even greater investments states and the federal government make in higher education. University leaders in fundraising and beyond have an obligation to provide alumni with candid information about the potential impacts of looming generational policy and funding shifts, along with opportunities to support their campus as advocates.

    In a crisis, information and attention necessarily flow first to on-campus constituents. Crisis communications and management plans may initially overlook alumni or underestimate the compelling role that they can play with both external and internal stakeholders. While most alumni are not on the campus, they are of the campus in deep and meaningful ways. And, unlike the handful of ultrawealthy alumni who have weighed in to the detriment of their Ivy League campuses, a broad group of alumni can bring practical wisdom and a voice of reason to challenging issues.

    Campus leaders now preparing for a long period of disruption should assess alumni engagement as part of this planning and gather their teams to consider:

    • How might alumni and development staff work with strategic communications, government relations staff and academic leaders to shape university messaging and advocacy?
    • What facts about policy and funding challenges do alumni need to understand in a media environment filled with misinformation?
    • How might alumni perspectives inform campus discourse about challenges to the institution’s values and academic freedom?
    • How might existing alumni programming provide opportunities for information-sharing between campus leaders, academic leaders and alumni?
    • How are campuses acknowledging and supporting alumni who are directly affected by changes in the federal workforce and economic disruption?

    This is a critical time for campus leaders to build bridges. Alumni can be a huge asset in this work. As degree holders, donors, professionals and citizens, engaged alumni know the specific value of their alma mater and of higher education broadly. They have stakes, authenticity and social capital, and they deserve the opportunity to add their voices.

    Lisa Akchin, senior counsel at RW Jones Agency and founder of On Purpose LLC, previously served as associate vice president for engagement and chief marketing officer at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

    Source link

  • Why Academics Need to Slow Down (opinion)

    Why Academics Need to Slow Down (opinion)

    A 2023 global survey of more than 900 faculty members found that 33 percent are “often or always” physically exhausted, 38 percent are emotionally exhausted and 40 percent are just worn-out. The constant pressure to conduct research, secure grants and fellowships, attend conferences, and publish or perish is only part of the story. There is, additionally, the immense responsibility to teach and mentor students who are facing their own mental health crises.

    In the inescapable race to beat the tenure clock and, once tenured, move to the next rung of the ladder while staying relevant and recognizable in our fields, faculty members need to take a pause. We must slow down to strengthen our mental health, ensure student success and produce meaningful scholarship.

    Some might ask how slowing down will help us keep up. How will we survive in academia if we are slow to publish in high-impact journals, or present our research in international forums, or participate in faculty development opportunities, or mentor multiple students, or be on several significant boards and committees? We will, if we do not equate slowness with being lazy or unproductive and, instead, understand it as the pace and the process that allows us to function and create deliberately, contemplatively, while resisting exhaustion and burnout.

    In my international conflict management classroom at Kennesaw State University, I encourage my students—future peacemakers—to think about slow peace. In my research on feminist agency in violent peripheral geographies, I deliberate on how, in zones of ongoing conflict, active resistance must (and does) surface in response to direct and immediate violence. But this only addresses the symptoms; in the urgency of the moment, what is not—and cannot—be addressed is the structural violence that results from a lack of cultivating peace as a way of life. Only by slowing down to reflect on, and gradually dismantle, the tools that perpetuate cultures and structures of violence can we enable enduring peace, ensure the well-being of the communities in conflict and reduce the recurrence of everyday violence.

    As I move deeper into decolonial feminist peace in my scholarship, teaching and practice, I recognize the university depends on some of the same tools of violence and patriarchal control that are used to perpetuate the colonial and postcolonial conflicts that we study in my classroom. For example, the “fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university” makes constant demands on faculty members’ time and effort, ensuring we are exhausted and preoccupied with “keeping up.” To meet its numerical expectations, we often sacrifice our “intellectual growth and personal freedom”; we rarely pause to reflect on the quality and real-world impact of our output or the toll it takes on us. Exhausted people rarely have the time or energy for community and rest, which are essential not only for individual well-being but also for collective resistance to slow violence.

    Similarly, colonial capitalists initiated my ancestors in Assam, in the peripheral northeast region of India, into the plantation (tea) and extraction (coal, oil) economies by weaponizing productivity and exhaustion. They denigrated our traditional lahe lahe way of life that was based on living gently, slowly and in organic harmony with the planet and its people. The nontribal people of Assam embraced capitalism and the culture of “hard work” and exhaustion. They also aligned with the colonizers to designate the tribal peasants who stayed connected with their ancestral lands and refused to work in the plantations as “lazy natives.”

    This process of ethnic fragmentation started by the colonizers was subsequently exploited by the post-/neocolonial Indian state to diffuse and dissipate resistance against itself as it continued to extract the communal resources of the ethnic people of Assam and its neighboring northeastern states while ignoring their customary laws and political rights and governing this peripheralized region through securitization and militarization. The historical, horizontal conflicts between the many communities of the Northeast undermined their necessary, vertical resistance against the Indian state. Meanwhile, on the Indian mainland, Assam is still derogatorily referred to as “the lahe lahe land” and people from the entire Northeast region are subjected to discrimination and racist violence.

    Building solidarities across marginalized entities alone can successfully challenge larger structures of oppression—whether racism, colonial violence or academic capitalism—that continue to thrive while we remain divided. In the conflict zone I call home, I advocate for addressing the slow and sustained violence that historically eroded indigenous ways of peaceful coexistence between communities. I propose ways of building peace by reintroducing customary nonviolent structures and cultures into everyday practices of communities, allowing community members to reconnect with each other and with nature and the environment.

    For example, traditional slow crafts like weaving organic cotton and silk fabrics involved the entire community while benefiting individual members and protecting the planet. Reviving these practices would slowly, but radically, disrupt the cycle and progression of violence and societal fragmentation.

    Within the academy, too, we can practice slow peace. My individual resistance began when I started questioning my sense of guilt and self-doubt about being unproductive or “slow.” Just as my precolonial ancestors did, I too realized that my self-worth is not tied to my productivity; I slowed down. This deepened my scholarship and made it more deliberate as I connected it to my embodied, intergenerational history. My approach to scholarship also grew more intentional as I re-examined its real-world impact.

    At the same time, I recalled that my lahe lahe culture valued rest and resting in community through finding connections with people, engaging in communal joy and being in nature. I moved away from commodified self-care products and apps and took more mindful breaths during my morning yoga. Now I am more energized in the classroom, where I practice laughter and joy with my students while encouraging them to build an empathetic and mutually caring classroom culture. They bring genuine engagement and produce strong work that they take ownership of. I have also added nature walks with emotional support coworkers, aka new friends, to my routine. Our conversations have led to research collaborations and several creative engagements with the local community.

    If, as Audre Lorde says, self-care is “warfare,” it is no less a war to attempt to build a community of care involving colleagues and students in institutions and settings that are engineered to facilitate isolation by emphasizing increasingly demanding personal achievements tied to hierarchies of power and privilege. As I continue to deliberately and strategically work on decolonizing my academic praxis, I am convinced that within the academy and outside—where our knowledge-making has consequences—the quicker we begin slowing down, the sooner we will reap the benefits of the lahe lahe life.

    Uddipana Goswami is author of Conflict and Reconciliation: The Politics of Ethnicity in Assam (Routledge 2014) and Gendering Peace in Violent Peripheries: Marginality, Masculinity and Feminist Agency (Routledge 2023). Gendering Peace earned an honorable mention in the International Studies Association’s Peace Section’s 2025 Best Global South Scholar Book Award. She teaches at the School of Conflict Management, Peacebuilding and Development at Kennesaw State University.

    Source link

  • Modest Thoughts From a Minor Donor to Harvard (opinion)

    Modest Thoughts From a Minor Donor to Harvard (opinion)

    Responding to Harvard University’s defiance of the coercive and illegal demands from the Trump administration, some major donors have recently urged the university to make accommodations rather than fight. A few have withheld large gifts over the last year and a half.

    Holding degrees from two of Harvard’s least wealthy schools (Divinity and Education), I have made small annual donations to my relatively impecunious alma maters for 45 years, and I offer these considerations to weigh against those of the big donors who have generally graduated from Harvard’s wealthiest, so-called major schools.

    Harvard’s resistance to authoritarian overreach bolsters the entire system of U.S. higher education, which came to be regarded as the best in the world only in the 1970s, after a century of slow development. Harvard’s defiance of unlawful authoritarianism inspires universities throughout the world.

    This controversy is therefore not just about Harvard, but all of higher education everywhere. If Harvard caves, then no university will dare to defy governmental overreach. If Harvard resists, then others will be inspired to do so and shamed if they do not.

    The urging by major donors to strike a deal with the Trump administration may result from feeling that Harvard’s small and secretive governing board, the Corporation, has, in recent months, not listened to them and ignored “the rightward shift of the country” that prompted Trump’s demands. (Although Harvard’s “major” and wealthiest professional schools—business, law and medicine—still graduate leading financiers on Wall Street and conservative justices of the Supreme Court, notwithstanding claims about the university’s “sins” of left-wing radicalism.)

    In any case, the implied threat of major donors to withhold donations is transactional, just like the demands of the Trump administration. Thus, Harvard is caught between two transactional parties. Is the defiance of coercive and illegal overreach worth the possible loss in large gifts?

    And the loss could be considerable. Over the last century, the rule in higher education fundraising is that 90 percent of gifts come from the top 10 percent of donors. Big donors count. Little ones scarcely, it seems.

    But there are financial counterpoints.

    By adjusting the spending rule for its endowment income and by floating bonds and loans, Harvard does have the resources to supplant lost federal income until its legal challenges are litigated, notwithstanding the prospect of further demands by the Trump administration.

    Indeed, the annual investment income of large endowments vastly exceeds annual fundraising. As a result, wealthy universities were already shifting their focus from “gifts to growth” of investment yield by the beginning of the 21st century. Fundraising became less important than investing endowment.

    Furthermore, major alumni donors, who might fear alienating the Trump administration by donating to Harvard, could easily make donations anonymously, which has long been a tradition in higher education.

    Finally, and most importantly, Harvard’s defiance has already inspired support from many alumni who may now do more, counterbalancing the support of transactional big donors who withdraw.

    I know that some little donors, like me, have not included Harvard in their estate plans precisely because Harvard has seemed so rich and invulnerable. As former president Drew Gilpin Faust once observed, Harvard’s commitment to its endowment could make the university “as close to immortal as any earthly institution might be.”

    Now we see that Harvard needs the support of all of its alumni in these perilous times, not only for the sake of alma mater, but all of higher education.

    Bruce A. Kimball, emeritus professor at the Ohio State University, is a former Guggenheim Fellow and co-author with Sarah M. Iler of Wealth, Price and Cost in American Higher Education: A Brief History (Johns Hopkins, 2023) and co-author with Daniel R. Coquillette of the two-volume history of Harvard Law School (Harvard 2015, 2020).

    Source link

  • Three Laws for Curriculum Design in an AI Age (opinion)

    Three Laws for Curriculum Design in an AI Age (opinion)

    Almost a third of students report that they don’t know how or when to use generative AI to help with coursework. On our campus, students tell us that they worry if they don’t learn how to use AI, they will be left behind in the workforce. At the same time, many students worry that technology undermines their learning.

    Here’s Gabby, an undergraduate on our campus: “It turned my writing into something I didn’t say. It makes it harder for me to think of my ideas and makes everything I think go away. It replaces it with what is official. It is correct, and I have a hard time not agreeing with it once ChatGPT says it. It overrides me.”

    Students experience additional anxiety around accusations of unauthorized use of AI tools—even when they are not using them. Here’s another student: “If I write like myself, I get points off for not following the rubric. If I fix my grammar and follow the template, my teacher will look at me and assume I used ChatGPT because brown people can’t write good enough.”

    Faculty guidance in the classroom is critical to addressing these concerns, especially as campuses increasingly provide students with access to enterprise GPTs. Our own campus system, California State University, recently rolled out an AI strategy that includes a “landmark” partnership with companies such as OpenAI, and a free subscription to Chat GPT Edu for all students, faculty and staff.

    Perhaps unsurprisingly, students are not the only ones who feel confused and worried about AI in this fast-moving environment. Faculty also express confusion about whether and under what circumstances it is OK for their students to use AI technology. In our roles at San Francisco State University’s Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CEETL), we are often asked about the need for campuswide policies and the importance of tools like Turnitin to ensure academic integrity.

    As Kyle Jensen noted at a recent American Association of Colleges and Universities event on AI and pedagogy, higher ed workers are experiencing a perceived lack of coherent leadership around AI, and an uneven delivery of information about it, in the face of the many demands on faculty and administrative time. Paradoxically, faculty are both keenly interested in the positive potential of AI technologies and insistent on the need for some sort of accountability system that punishes students for unauthorized use of AI tools.

    The need for faculty to clarify the role of AI in the curriculum is pressing. To address this at CEETL, we have developed what we are calling “Three Laws of Curriculum in the Age of AI,” a play on Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics,” written to ensure that humans remained in control of technology. Our three laws are not laws, per se; they are a framework for thinking about how to address AI technology in the curriculum at all levels, from the individual classroom to degree-level road maps, from general education through graduate courses. The framework is designed to support faculty as they work their way through the challenges and promises of AI technologies. The framework lightens the cognitive load for faculty by connecting AI technology to familiar ways of designing and revising curriculum.

    The first law concerns what students need to know about AI, including how the tools work as well as their social, cultural, environmental and labor impacts; potential biases; tendencies toward hallucinations and misinformation; and propensity to center Western European ways of knowing, reasoning and writing. Here we lean on critical AI to help students apply their critical information literacy skills to AI technologies. Thinking about how to teach students about AI aligns with core equity values at our university, and it harnesses faculty’s natural skepticism toward these tools. This first law—teaching students about AI—offers a bridge between AI enthusiasts and skeptics by grounding our approach to AI in the classroom with familiar and widely agreed-upon equity values and critical approaches.

    The second part of our three laws framework asks what students need to know in order to work with AI ethically and equitably. How should students work with these tools as they become increasingly embedded in the platforms and programs they already use, and as they are integrated into the jobs and careers our students hope to enter? As Kathleen Landy recently asked, “What do we want the students in our academic program[s] to know and be able to do with (or without) generative AI?”

    The “with” part of our framework supports faculty as they begin the work of revising learning outcomes, assignments and assessment materials to include AI use.

    Finally, and perhaps most crucially (and related to the “without” in Landy’s question), what skills and practices do students need to develop without AI, in order to protect their learning, to prevent deskilling and to center their own culturally diverse ways of knowing? Here is a quote from Washington University’s Center for Teaching and Learning:

    “Sometimes students must first learn the basics of a field in order to achieve long-term success, even if they might later use shortcuts when working on more advanced material. We still teach basic mathematics to children, for example, even though as adults we all have access to a calculator on our smartphones. GenAI can also produce false results (aka ‘hallucinations’) and often only a user who understands the fundamental concepts at play can recognize this when it happens.”

    Bots sound authoritative, and because they sound so good, students can feel convinced by them, leading to situations where bots override or displace students’ own thinking; thus, their use may curtail opportunities for students to develop and practice the kinds of thinking that undergird many learning goals. Protecting student learning from AI helps faculty situate their concerns about academic integrity in terms of the curriculum, rather than in terms of detection or policing of student behaviors. It invites faculty to think about how they might redesign assignments to provide spaces for students to do their own thinking.

    Providing and protecting such spaces undoubtedly poses increased challenges for faculty, given the ubiquity of AI tools available to students. But we also know that protecting student learning from easy shortcuts is at the heart of formal education. Consider the planning that goes into determining whether an assessment should be open-book or open-note, take-home or in-class. These decisions are rooted in the third law: What would most protect student learning from the use of shortcuts (e.g., textbooks, access to help) that undermine their learning?

    University websites are awash in resource guides for faculty grappling with new technology. It can be overwhelming for faculty, to say the least, especially given high teaching loads and constraints on faculty time. Our three laws framework provides a scaffold for faculty as they sift through resources on AI and begin the work of redesigning assignments, activities and assessments to address AI. You can see our three laws in action here, in field notes from Jennifer’s efforts to redesign her first-year writing class to address the challenges and potential of AI technology.

    In the spirit of connecting the new with the familiar, we’ll close by reminding readers that while AI technology poses new challenges, these challenges are in some ways not so different from the work of curriculum and assessment design that we regularly undertake when we build our courses. Indeed, faculty have long grappled with the questions raised by our current moment. We’ll leave you with this quote, from a 1991 (!) article by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe on the rise of word-processing technology and writing studies:

    “We do not advocate abandoning the use of technology and relying primarily on script and print for our teaching without the aid of word processing and other computer applications such as communication software; nor do we suggest eliminating our descriptions of the positive learning environments that technology can help us to create. Instead, we must try to use our awareness of the discrepancies we have noted as a basis for constructing a more complete image of how technology can be used positively and negatively. We must plan carefully and develop the necessary critical perspectives to help us avoid using computers to advance or promote mediocrity in writing instruction. A balanced and increasingly critical perspective is a starting point: by viewing our classes as sites of both paradox and promise we can construct a mature view of how the use of electronic technology can abet our teaching.”

    Anoshua Chaudhuri is the senior director of the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning and professor of economics at San Francisco State University.

    Jennifer Trainor is a faculty director at the Center for Equity and Excellence in Teaching and Learning and professor of English at San Francisco State University.

    Source link

  • Beware Illusions of Campus Normalcy This Spring (opinion)

    Beware Illusions of Campus Normalcy This Spring (opinion)

    It’s nearing the end of the academic year at Harvard University, where I teach in the Graduate School of Education. Students are preparing for final exams and finishing up capstone projects. Awards ceremonies are being held and celebrations, formal and informal, have begun. The weather has finally warmed up in Cambridge, and the outdoor tables at restaurants and coffee shops are crowded. The women’s tennis team clinched the Ivy League title.

    It all feels normal. Yet it all feels discordant, like a scene in a M. Night Shyamalan movie that infuses the quotidian with a barely detectable feeling of dread.

    This discordance is of course especially powerful at Harvard, the current epicenter of a ferocious and lawless attack on higher education that might make Viktor Orbán blush. But it is not unique to Harvard. At colleges and universities across the country, classes continue, clubs meet and Frisbees are being tossed even as the government sows fear and confusion by revoking, then restoring, then warning that it might again revoke the visa statuses of more than 1,800 international students.

    Lawyers continue to do what lawyers do, while large firms are essentially signing on to be instruments of the government, individuals are being targeted because the president of the United States holds a grudge, bigly, and court orders are being ignored.

    Doctors continue to treat patients while billions of dollars of funding for medical research and experimental trials are being withheld and the secretary of Health and Human Services is declaring that autism is preventable and the measles vaccine is maybe, sort of OK.

    We get in our cars or on our bicycles and go off to work while the government is pressing before the courts an argument that would allow it to send anyone, citizen or noncitizen, to a foreign prison without cause or legal recourse.

    When many of us think about authoritarian takeovers, we imagine military coups and declarations of martial law. But the truth is that the most powerful tool of the aspiring authoritarian is not shock, but normalcy. How bad can things be if we can still shop at Costco or take our families out for Italian food? How bad can they be if we can still download Maya Angelou onto our Kindles or watch Jimmy Kimmel Live!? How bad can they be if I can still publish a piece like this one, critical of the federal government?

    Look around not only at the campuses, but at the streets and bars and hardware stores in any city or town in America and it appears to be the same as it was last year and the year before. The NBA playoffs have begun and there’s a new film starring Michael B. Jordan. Normal.

    Except it is not, in ways of which we are vaguely aware but unable or unwilling to fully credit.

    For most people—the ones not scooped off the street by men in masks or ousted from their jobs with the federal government without cause or forced to stop their research because of the loss of National Institutes of Health funding—life feels more or less the way it did when we were a reasonably functional democracy. This is the way it works: Keep 99 percent of the lives of 99 percent of the people undisturbed for as long as possible so that they will remain unaware of or indifferent to what is happening at the margins. By the time they recognize that the edges of normalcy have drawn closer, it will be too late to do anything about it because the guardrails will have been destroyed.

    Begin with the least sympathetic targets. Who will shed tears for the fate of Venezuelan gang members (real or imagined)? Does anyone really like Big Law? Government employees are the problem, not the solution. Harvard, with its giant endowment and Ivy League arrogance, is rarely anyone’s idea of an underdog. Why should we concern ourselves with any of this on the way to McDonald’s or Starbucks? I work at Harvard and most of the time I find it difficult to take seriously the reality that the federal government is trying to destroy a private university simply to prove that it can and because its appetite for both control and chaos appears to have no limits.

    Be sure to cite rules and regulations that few people care to understand. What is 501(c)(3) status anyway? “Indirect costs” seem sort of like a scam. The “Alien Enemies Act” sounds like something pulled from the latest Marvel movie. Then cloak it all in the guise of causes to which it seems difficult to object—fighting antisemitism, because Donald Trump and the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Proud Boys are the first things that come to mind when one thinks about protecting Jews. Or perhaps national security, given the threat to the republic posed by international students co-authoring op-eds for the campus newspaper.

    Above all, lie. Constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly lie. Since most people don’t spend a majority of their time lying about a majority of things, they appear to find it difficult to recognize when other people do. It’s hard to question a time-tested strategy.

    The fight against our current level of inertia is painfully difficult because the allure of the normal, the desire to believe that things are just fine, is so powerful. A tank in the street is hard to ignore. A steady eroding of legal and ethical norms just beyond the limits of our daily vision is easy to miss.

    Our greatest hope might be the tendency of authoritarians and those without any moral compass to overreach. If they can change life by 1 percent without much resistance, why not five or 10 or 20? If they can, through executive actions, free hundreds of convicted felons and strip away environmental protections, why not impose arbitrary and irrational tariffs? What made the reaction to tariffs different and what has, at least for the moment, slowed their progress is the fact that they tore a hole in the illusion of normalcy. Plummeting retirement accounts and worries about the cost of groceries will disrupt the normal in a way that canceling student visas or defunding Harvard will not. It was a mistake, and they will, out of arrogance and stupidity, make more.

    The set of demands sent to Harvard, for instance, which Harvard refused to comply with, resulting in headlines around the globe, was apparently sent in error. You could make that up, but no one would believe you.

    Meanwhile, I wonder whether we can afford to wait. Is it sufficient to hope that they will make things abnormal enough for a large enough group of people to provoke resistance, or do we have to do the difficult work of wrenching ourselves, somehow, out of the reassuring comforts of familiar routines? David Brooks, hardly a radical, has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to counter the war being waged on our national civic fabric. Do people, organizations and institutions in the United States, so certain for so long about the permanence of its democracy, even have the energy or the will? Can that happen here or is it something that happens in Seoul or Istanbul and is shown on CNN?

    Meanwhile, I have laundry to do and a class to teach this week. Maybe I’ll catch something on Netflix. Pretty normal stuff.

    Brian Rosenberg is president emeritus of Macalester College, a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and author of Whatever It Is, I’m Against It: Resistance to Change in Higher Education (Harvard Education Press, 2023).

    Source link

  • We Already Have an Ethics Framework for AI (opinion)

    We Already Have an Ethics Framework for AI (opinion)

    For the third time in my career as an academic librarian, we are facing a digital revolution that is radically and rapidly transforming our information ecosystem. The first was when the internet became broadly available by virtue of browsers. The second was the emergence of Web 2.0 with mobile and social media. The third—and current—results from the increasing ubiquity of AI, especially generative AI.

    Once again, I am hearing a combination of fear-based thinking alongside a rhetoric of inevitability and scoldings directed at those critics who are portrayed as “resistant to change” by AI proponents. I wish I were hearing more voices advocating for the benefits of specific uses of AI alongside clearheaded acknowledgment of risks of AI in specific circumstances and an emphasis on risk mitigation. Academics should approach AI as a tool for specific interventions and then assess the ethics of those interventions.

    Caution is warranted. The burden of building trust should be on the AI developers and corporations. While Web 2.0 delivered on its promise of a more interactive, collaborative experience on the web that centered user-generated content, the fulfillment of that promise was not without societal costs.

    In retrospect, Web 2.0 arguably fails to meet the basic standard of beneficence. It is implicated in the global rise of authoritarianism, in the undermining of truth as a value, in promoting both polarization and extremism, in degrading the quality of our attention and thinking, in a growing and serious mental health crisis, and in the spread of an epidemic of loneliness. The information technology sector has earned our deep skepticism. We should do everything in our power to learn from the mistakes of our past and do what we can to prevent similar outcomes in the future.

    We need to develop an ethical framework for assessing uses of new information technology—and specifically AI—that can guide individuals and institutions as they consider employing, promoting and licensing these tools for various functions. There are two main factors about AI that complicate ethical analysis. The first is that an interaction with AI frequently continues past the initial user-AI transaction; information from that transaction can become part of the system’s training set. Secondly, there is often a significant lack of transparency about what the AI model is doing under the surface, making it difficult to assess. We should demand as much transparency as possible from tool providers.

    Academia already has an agreed-upon set of ethical principles and processes for assessing potential interventions. The principles in “The Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research” govern our approach to research with humans and can fruitfully be applied if we think of potential uses of AI as interventions. These principles not only benefit academia in making assessments about using AI but also provide a framework for technology developers thinking through their design requirements.

    The Belmont Report articulates three primary ethical principles:

    1. Respect for persons
    2. Beneficence
    3. Justice

    “Respect for persons,” as it’s been translated into U.S. code and practiced by IRBs, has several facets, including autonomy, informed consent and privacy. Autonomy means that individuals should have the power to control their engagement and should not be coerced to engage. Informed consent requires that people should have clear information so that they understand what they are consenting to. Privacy means a person should have control and choice about how their personal information is collected, stored, used and shared.

    Following are some questions we might ask to assess whether a particular AI intervention honors autonomy.

    • Is it obvious to users that they are interacting with AI? This becomes increasingly important as AI is integrated into other tools.
    • Is it obvious when something was generated by AI?
    • Can users control how their information is harvested by AI, or is the only option to not use the tool?
    • Can users access essential services without engaging with AI? If not, that may be coercive.
    • Can users control how information they produce is used by AI? This includes whether their content is used to train AI models.
    • Is there a risk of overreliance, especially if there are design elements that encourage psychological dependency? From an educational perspective, is using an AI tool for a particular purpose likely to prevent users from learning foundational skills so that they become dependent on the model?

    In relation to informed consent, is the information provided about what the model is doing both sufficient and in a form that a person who is neither a lawyer nor a technology developer can understand? It is imperative that users be given information about what data is going to be collected from which sources and what will happen to that data.

    Privacy infringement happens either when someone’s personal data is revealed or used in an unintended way or when information thought private is correctly inferred. When there is sufficient data and computing power, re-identification of research subjects is a danger. Given that “de-identification of data” is one of the most common strategies for risk mitigation in human subjects’ research, and there is an increasing emphasis on publishing data sets for the purposes of research reproducibility, this is an area of ethical concern that demands attention. Privacy emphasizes that individuals should have control over their private information, but how that private information is used should also be assessed in relation to the second major principle—beneficence.

    Beneficence is the general principle that says that the benefits should outweigh the risks of harm and that risks should be mitigated as much as possible. Beneficence should be assessed on multiple levels—both the individual and the systemic. The principle of beneficence demands that we pay particularly careful attention to those who are vulnerable because they lack full autonomy, such as minors.

    Even when making personal decisions, we need to think about potential systemic harms. For example, some vendors offer tools that allow researchers to share their personal information in order to generate highly personalized search results—increasing research efficiency. As the tool builds a picture of the researcher, it will presumably continue to refine results with the goal of not showing things that it does not believe are useful to the researcher. This may benefit the individual researcher. However, on a systemic level, if such practices become ubiquitous, will the boundaries between various discourses harden? Will researchers doing similar scholarship get shown an increasingly narrow view of the world, focused on research and outlooks that are similar to each other, while researchers in a different discourse are shown a separate view of the world? If so, would this disempower interdisciplinary or radically novel research or exacerbate disciplinary confirmation bias? Can such risks be mitigated? We need to develop a habit of thinking about potential impacts beyond the individual in order to create mitigations.

    There are many potential benefits to certain uses of AI. There are real possibilities it can rapidly advance medicine and science—see, for example, the stunning successes of the protein structure database AlphaFold. There are corresponding potentialities for swift advances in technology that can serve the common good, including in our fight against the climate crisis. The potential benefits are transformative, and a good ethical framework should encourage them. The principle of beneficence does not demand that there are no risks, but that we should identify uses where the benefits are significant and that we mitigate the risks, both individual and systemic. Risks can be minimized by improving the tools, such as work to prevent them from hallucinating, propagating toxic or misleading content, or delivering inappropriate advice.

    Questions of beneficence also require attention to environmental impacts of generative AI models. Because the models require vast amounts of computing power and, therefore, electricity, using them taxes our collective infrastructure and contributes to pollution. When analyzing a particular use through the ethical lens of beneficence, we should ask whether the proposed use provides enough likely benefit to justify the environmental harm. Use of AI for trivial purposes arguably fails the test for beneficence.

    The principle of justice demands that the people and populations who bear the risks should also receive the benefits. With AI, there are significant equity concerns. For example, generative AI may be trained on data that includes our biases, both current and historic. Models must be rigorously tested to see if they create prejudicial or misleading content. Similarly, AI tools should be closely interrogated to ensure that they do not work better for some groups than for others. Inequities impact the calculations of beneficence and, depending on the stakes of the use case, could make the use unethical.

    Another consideration in relation to the principle of justice and AI is the issue of fair compensation and attribution. It is important that AI does not undermine creative economies. Additionally, scholars are important content producers, and the academic coin of the realm is citations. Content creators have a right to expect that their work will be used with integrity, will be cited and that they will be remunerated appropriately. As part of autonomy, content creators should also be able to control whether their material is used in a training set, and this should, at least going forward, be part of author negotiations. Similarly, the use of AI tools in research should be cited in the scholarly product; we need to develop standards about what is appropriate to include in methodology sections and citations, and possibly when an AI model should be granted co-authorial status.

    The principles outlined above from the Belmont Report are, I believe, sufficiently flexible to allow for further and rapid developments in the field. Academia has a long history of using them as guidance to make ethical assessments. They give us a shared foundation from which we can ethically promote the use of AI to be of benefit to the world while simultaneously avoiding the types of harms that can poison the promise.

    Gwendolyn Reece is the director of research, teaching and learning at American University’s library and a former chair of American’s institutional review board.

    Source link

  • How to Lead Through Uncertainty (opinion)

    How to Lead Through Uncertainty (opinion)

    Uncertainty is unavoidable. Whether it relates to relatively minor topics such as today’s traffic and weather or potentially life-altering issues such as our health and employment, coping with an unknown future is part of our daily lives. At the same time, we are living in a moment of extraordinary uncertainty, with numerous changes to the landscape of higher education and increasing economic instability.

    If you are in a leadership role—whether that means leading an academic unit or leading a research lab or classroom—you may be feeling the weight not only of managing uncertainty for yourself, but also of guiding those you lead through uncertain terrain. In doing so, you are likely to encounter situations where those you lead are looking for definitive information around questions that you are not able to answer.

    How do you lead in these situations? I’m a firm believer that leaders can always do something even when it is not the specific thing that people are hoping for. In this case, I propose that even when we can’t provide answers or predict what the future will hold, we can offer something that might be even more valuable—the skills needed to manage uncertainty.

    Empowering others in the face of uncertainty is a complex and nuanced process, and your approach will differ depending on each individual and context. However, some steps that are likely to be helpful are:

    • Acknowledge the challenge. As a leader, you may feel an urge to avoid talking about issues that you’re not able to solve. However, this does not make those issues any less real for those you lead. Start by validating what is at stake for an individual, whether this is job stability, research funding or admission to graduate school. You can also acknowledge the broader challenge that uncertainty brings and how it taxes us mentally and emotionally. Acknowledging challenges does not mean that you are taking the blame for their existence or that you will not advocate to uphold the rights of individuals and shared values of your institution. However, openly recognizing the reality of a situation can go a long way in building trust with those you lead.
    • Reflect on past resilience. Every person you lead is a unique individual with their own way of managing adversity. You can offer some general strategies, such as focusing on purpose and impact and leaning on community for support. Even more helpful is to empower each person by encouraging them to reflect on challenges they have faced in the past and think about what strategies and supports enabled them to manage those situations. Helping someone remember that they have overcome difficult situations in the past provides guidance as to how they can do so again and builds their self-confidence to do exactly that.
    • Focus on what you can control. One of the many things that uncertainty robs us of is our sense of self-determination. A natural response is to place the greatest focus on the areas where we have the least amount of control. Effectively managing uncertainty or adversity can require that we do the opposite. Importantly, our domain of control includes both what we do and how we do it. You can offer guidance to an individual on how to create a plan and take actions that are within their domain of control, while also reinforcing that they are the one in control of the values and ethics that will guide the choice and implementation of those actions.
    • Create space for self-care. When the challenges we face may stretch over weeks, months or even years, self-care is more critical than ever in sustaining ourselves for what is to come. Just as you can help each person you lead reflect on their unique coping strategies, you can help them make a plan for self-care activities that will provide the greatest benefit to their mental health. This might include time spent doing activities they enjoy alongside people they care about. It can also mean checking out for a set time and playing video games or streaming a show where the only value is entertainment.

    Depending on your leadership role, simply managing your current responsibilities may already feel overwhelming. Adding in the task of helping others manage uncertainty may seem impossible. You may also feel unprepared to navigate a topic for which you haven’t received specific training. Those are very real challenges, but they do not have to prevent you from taking action.

    The principles outlined above can be woven into everyday meetings and email discussions and thus reap benefit without increasing workload. You can also lean on existing resources and expertise to disseminate helpful ideas in a time-efficient manner. For example, consider sharing an article or podcast on resilience, uncertainty or self-care with your team and setting aside 15 to 20 minutes at your next meeting to discuss the advice offered by experts. Or for a deeper dive, you can choose a book and work through each chapter together over a monthly sack lunch.

    As a leader, there is always something that you can do. And even when you don’t have all of the answers, you can have a powerful positive impact by mindfully guiding yourself and others through uncertainty.

    Jen Heemstra is the Charles Allen Thomas Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Department of Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research is focused on harnessing biomolecules for applications in medicine and the environment, and she is the author of the forthcoming book Labwork to Leadership (Harvard University Press, August 2025)

    Source link

  • Demands of Harvard Are Blueprint for Repression (opinion)

    Demands of Harvard Are Blueprint for Repression (opinion)

    Harvard University’s courageous refusal to obey the demands of the Trump administration—and its subsequent filing of a lawsuit this week seeking restoration of its federal funding—has inspired praise across academia. But there has been less attention to just how terrible those demands were. No government entity in the United States has ever proposed such repressive measures against a college. By making outrageous demands a condition of federal funding—and freezing $2.2 billion in funds because Harvard refused to obey—the Trump administration is setting a precedent for threatening the same authoritarian measures against every college in America.

    The April 11 letter to Harvard from Trump administration officials proposed a staggering level of control over a private college. Although at least one of the authors reported that the letter was sent in error while negotiations were still ongoing, this mistake didn’t stop the Trump administration from punishing Harvard for refusing to accept its dictates.

    After Harvard rejected the demands, Trump himself posted further threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status on social media, even though federal law bars presidents from directly or indirectly requesting Internal Revenue Service investigations against specific targets: “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’” Of course, if Harvard obeyed the Trump regime’s orders to silence political speech, it would be pushing a right-wing ideological agenda.

    Among the stipulations in the April 11 letter, the Trump administration demanded the power to compel hiring based on political views to, in effect, give almost complete preference to political conservatives: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity; every teaching unit found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by admitting a critical mass of students who will provide viewpoint diversity.” Since most people who enter academia are liberal, as are most current academics, this demand for ideological balance would effectively ban the hiring of liberal professors in virtually all departments for many years.

    Decisions on how to measure the presence or lack of viewpoint diversity would be made by “an external party” hired by Harvard with the approval of the federal government (meaning Trump). Government-imposed discrimination based on viewpoint would also apply to students, since the letter requires the “external party … to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” If every department “must be individually viewpoint diverse,” then students with underrepresented viewpoints (Nazis, perhaps?) must receive special preferences in admissions. This concept that every department’s students, faculty and staff must match the distribution of viewpoints of the general population is both repressive and crazy to imagine.

    The Trump administration letter also ordered Harvard to commission a Trump-approved consultant to report on “individual faculty members” who “incited students to violate Harvard’s rules following October 7”—and asserted that Harvard must “cooperate” with the federal government to “determine appropriate sanctions” for these professors. Retroactively punishing professors who violated no rules for allegedly encouraging student protesters is an extraordinary abuse of government power.

    Not to stop there, the Trump administration letter seeks to suppress the right to protest: “Discipline at Harvard must include immediate intervention and stoppage of disruptions … including by the Harvard police when necessary to stop a disruption.” Since the Trump administration seems to regard every protest as a “disruption” (and Harvard itself has wrongly banned silent protests), this could require immediate police intervention to stop a broad range of actions.

    The Trump administration also demanded unprecedented control over Harvard’s disciplinary system to order punishments of student protesters without due process. Among other specific steps, the Trump administration ordered Harvard to ban five specific student groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and the National Lawyers Guild, and “discipline” all “active members of those student organizations,” including by banning them from serving as officers in any other student groups. And Harvard would be compelled to implement government-imposed punishments by “permanently expelling the students involved in the October 18 assault of an Israeli Harvard Business School student and suspending students involved in occupying university buildings.”

    Shared governance is another target of Trump and his minions. The Trump administration’s demands for Harvard included “reducing the power held by students and untenured faculty” and “reducing the power held by faculty (whether tenured or untenured) and administrators more committed to activism than scholarship.” It’s bizarre to imagine that a university could be forced by the government to determine whether a professor is committed to “activism” before banning them from any position of power such as a department chair or committee member. The letter also demands “removing or reforming institutional bodies and practices that delay and obstruct enforcement [of campus rules governing protests], including the relevant Administrative Boards and FAS Faculty Council.”

    Not surprisingly, the Trump administration’s letter also demands a complete ban on diversity programs: “The University must immediately shutter all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, offices, committees, positions, and initiatives, under whatever name.” This repression not only interferes with the ability of universities to run their own operations, but it is also designed to suppress speech on a massive scale by banning all programs anywhere in the university that address issues of diversity and equity, with no exceptions for academic programs.

    There’s more. Harvard would be forced to share “all hiring and related data” to permit endless ideological “audits.” A requirement that “all existing and prospective faculty shall be reviewed for plagiarism” could be used to purge controversial faculty. Perhaps the most ironic part of the letter to Harvard is its command for ideological control over foreign students: “the University must reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence.” Trump’s regime is undermining the Constitution and shredding the Bill of Rights, while demanding that foreign students prove their devotion to the very documents that the Trump administration is destroying.

    The Trump administration’s letter to Harvard should shock and appall even those conservatives who previously expressed some sympathy with the desire to punish elite universities by any means necessary. This is fascism, pure and simple. It portends an effort to assert total government control over all public and private universities to compel them to obey orders about their hiring, admissions, discipline and other policies. It is an attempt to control virtually every aspect of colleges to suppress free expression, ban protests and impose a far-right agenda.

    It’s tempting to hope that the Trump administration merely wanted to target Harvard alone and freeze its funding by proposing a long series of absurdly evil demands, knowing that no college could possibly agree to obey.

    But the reality is that the letter to Harvard is a fascist blueprint for total control of all colleges in America, public and private. The demand for authoritarian control by the Trump administration is an assault on higher education and free speech in general. If Trump officials can impose repression on any college they target, then private corporations (as the assaults on private law firms have indicated) and state and local governments will soon follow.

    The government repression that began with Columbia University will not end with Harvard or the Ivy League institutions. These are the first volleys in a war against academic freedom, with the clear aim of suppressing free expression on campus or destroying colleges in the battle.

    Source link