Tag: opinion

  • Review of Adamson’s “A Century of Tomorrows” (opinion)

    Review of Adamson’s “A Century of Tomorrows” (opinion)

    The name of an ambition more than it is of a body of knowledge, the term “futurology” is attributed by one source on word origins to Aldous Huxley. The author of Brave New World is a plausible candidate, of course; he is credited with coining it in 1946. But a search of JSTOR turns up an article from three years earlier suggesting that Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West made him the pioneer of “what one may hope will sometime develop into a real science of ‘Futurology.’”

    The author of that article was a political scientist and émigré from Nazi Germany named Ossip K. Flechtheim, then teaching at the historically Black Atlanta University; the article itself was published in a historically Black scholarly journal, Phylon. He soon decided that his idea’s time had come.

    By 1945, writing in The Journal of Higher Education, Flechtheim advocated for futurology both as an emerging line of interdisciplinary scholarship and as a matter of urgent concern to “the present-day student, whose life-span may well stretch into the twenty-first century.” He was optimistic about futurology’s potential to advance knowledge: Maintaining that “a large number of scholars” concurred on “the major problems which humanity would face” in the coming decades, he announced that “predict[ing] the most probable trends is a task which we have the means to accomplish successfully today.”

    But as Niels Bohr and/or Yogi Berra famously put it, “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.” Flechtheim went on to publish landmark contributions to the incipient field of study, surely expecting that a proper social science of the future would be established by the turn of the millennium. But on this point, as in most cases, subsequent history only confirms the Bohr-Berra conundrum.

    One rough metric of futurology’s public-intellectual salience over time is how often the word appears per year in publications stored in the Google Books database. The resulting graph shows barely any use of the term before about 1960. But with the new decade there is a sudden burst of activity: a period of steep acceleration lasting about two decades, then collapsing dramatically over the final years of the 20th century. The JSTOR search results show much the same pattern.

    And so it is that Glenn Adamson’s A Century of Tomorrows: How Imagining the Future Shapes the Present (Bloomsbury Publishing) approaches the subject with not so much skepticism about futurology’s prospects as a certain irony about its very status as a distinct kind of knowledge. The author, a curator and a historian, attaches Flechtheim’s neologism as a label to a kaleidoscopic array of efforts to anticipate the shape of things to come, whether by analyzing statistical trends, through artistic creativity or in experimentation with new ways of life. The book concentrates on the United States and the 20th century, but inevitably the larger world and earlier history shape the book, which also reflects some 21st-century pressures as well.

    Plenty of science fiction novels have done better at imagining life in subsequent decades than think tank projections made in the same era. But comparing prognostications for relative accuracy is not Adamson’s real concern. Whatever means it may employ, the futurological imperative is always to respond to current reality—to its perceived failings or potentials, to the opportunities and terrors looming over the world or lurking just out of sight. Adamson writes that “every story about the future is also a demand to intervene in the present.” The forms of intervention considered include political movements, religious revivals, market research, scenarios for thermonuclear war, hippie communes, the insurance industry and time capsules assembled for future generations to ponder (to give an abbreviated list).

    The future’s uncertainty provides a blank screen for projecting contemporary issues in reimagined form and the opportunity to imagine alternatives. (Or to imagine inevitabilities, whether of the encouraging or despairing kind.)

    The author takes futurology to have emerged in the 19th century as a response to concerns previously the domain of religious traditions. Utopia and dystopia provide fairly obvious secular analogues to heaven and hell. But there is more to it than that. “For those who no longer saw the future as a matter of revealed truth,” Adamson writes, “new forms of authority stepped in to fill the gap. This is where the futurologists would come in. They would not only make claims about what lies ahead but also somehow persuade others of their ability to see it.”

    The grounds for claiming such authority proliferated, as did the visions themselves, in ways resistant to linear narrative. Instead, the author pulls seemingly unconnected developments together into thematic clusters, rather like museum exhibits displayed in partly chronological and partly thematic order.

    For example, the futurological cluster he calls the Machine includes the organization Technocracy, Inc., which in the early 1930s won a hearing for its plan to put the entire economy under the control of engineers who would end the waste, bottlenecks and underperformance that had, they purported, caused the Depression.

    Enthusiasm for the Technocracy’s social blueprints was short-lived, but it expressed a wider trend. Futurologists of this ilk “set about creating self-correcting, self-regulating systems; conceptually speaking, they became machine builders.” Under this heading Adamson includes enthusiasts for “the Soviet experiment” (as non-Communist admirers liked to call it), but also the market-minded professionals involved in industrial design, especially for automobiles: “The advance planning of annual model changes was a way to humanize technology, while also setting the horizon of consumer expectation.”

    Whereas the Machine-oriented visionaries of the early 20th century had specific goals for the future (and confidence about being able to meet them), a different attitude prevailed after World War II among those Adamson calls the Lab futurologists. The future was for them “something to be studied under laboratory conditions, with multiple scenarios measured and compared against one another.” Some of them had access to the enormous computers of the day, and the attention of people making decisions of the highest consequence.

    “Prediction was becoming a much subtler art,” the author continues, “with one defining exception: the prediction of nuclear annihilation, a zero multiplier for all human hopes.”

    Those who thought life in a Machine world sounded oppressive offered visions of the future as Garden, where a healthier balance between urban and rural life could prevail. A corresponding horror at Lab scenarios spawned what Adamson calls Party futurology. This started in Haight-Ashbury, fought back at the Stonewall and generated the radical feminist movement that still haunts some people’s nightmares.

    Missing from my thumbnail sketch here is all the historical texture of the book (including a diverse group of figures, leading and otherwise) as well as its working out of connections among seemingly unrelated developments.

    As mentioned, the book is centered on 20th-century America. Even so, “Flood,” the final chapter (not counting the conclusion), takes up forces that have continued to accumulate in the early millennium. Flood-era futurology is not defined either by climate change or digital hypersaturation of attention. The main element I’ll point out here is Adamson’s sense that futurology’s own future has been compromised by an excess of noise and meretricious pseudo-insight.

    The floods of dubious information (from too many sources to evaluate) make it harder to establish reality in the present, much less to extrapolate from it. Filling the void is a churn of simulated thought the author calls Big Ideas. “By this,” he writes, “I mean a general prediction about culture at large that initially feels like an important insight, but is actually either so general as to be beyond dispute, or so vague as to be immune to disproof.” Much better, on the whole, is to study the record of futurology itself, with its history as a warning against secular fortune-telling.

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

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  • Higher ed is not a public good—but it could be (opinion)

    Higher ed is not a public good—but it could be (opinion)

    ogichobanov/iStock/Getty Images Plus

    When 85,000 Cornhuskers all wear red on game day, it’s easy to think of college as something larger than students and professors, classes, research and extracurriculars. Berkeley, Penn State and Michigan each have hundreds of thousands of online followers. Tar Heel nation is, after all, a nation.

    But wearing “college” on our chests does not a polity make. Higher education is not a public good and Americans know it.

    In the plainest sense, public goods aren’t excludable. Think of the air we breathe, interstate freeways and national defense. Everyone is affected by carbon dioxide levels, can travel by open roads and is protected, equally, from foreign threats.

    But when it comes to higher ed, exclusion is the name of the game.

    Admissions offices reject most applicants from selective colleges and create barriers at others. Tuition, even when subsidized, deters those shocked by sticker prices or unable to pay. Courses are controlled by departments, yet some intellectual climates drive students away. Governance, when behind closed doors, excludes parents, students, employers and other stakeholders.

    All told, the labyrinth of exclusionary practices makes higher ed more of a private than public good. We can interpret low public confidence in higher education as reflecting a belief that college is for someone else. Of those who matriculate, two-thirds of new community college students form the same opinion and drop out or enter a broken transfer system. One-third of new B.A. students will drop out or take more than six years to graduate. Once they’re gone, it’s often for good: Only 2.6 percent of stop-outs re-enrolled in the 2022–23 academic year. All told, this has led to a societal “diploma divide”: More people without a college degree voted for Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 than in 2020.

    Colleges and universities do need to reclaim a place of pride in American society. But instead of ambiguous calls “reaffirming higher education’s public purpose,” why not simply be more public? And deliver an education that is, well, more good?

    My new book, Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good (Teachers College Press), argues that educational institutions of any sort—private nonprofit, state-controlled or proprietary—can be more publicly purposed when they meet two criteria. First, they must prepare each generation to sustain the common goods on which American life rests: a vibrant democracy, a productive economy, a civil society and a healthy planet. These are three long-standing aims and one new existential goal, around which colleges and universities can better organize the student experience.

    Second, institutions must themselves operate in ways that are more public than private. To do so, Publicization offers an “Exclusion Test” applicable to six domains—funding, governance, goals, accountability, equity and an institution’s underlying educational philosophy. Colleges and universities can apply the test to these areas and identify where operations can be less exclusionary and therefore more public.

    For example, do policies assume that some students aren’t “college ready,” or do we meet everyone—particularly those impacted by COVID-19—where they are? To what extent do applications create formal and informal hurdles, or do we offer more streamlined direct admission? Are inequitable proxies like Advanced Placement Calculus blocking talented students from admission, or does coursework in more widely relevant areas like statistics matter equally? Are free college plans riddled with eligibility fine print or open to anyone?

    Are courses gated by size, section, time of day and instructor approval, or are they more accessible? Are we mostly catering to young adults or presenting real options for the almost 37 million Americans with some college but no degree? Is federal funding considered a necessary evil, or is Washington engaged as a key stakeholder? Do boards focus narrowly on institutional issues or see themselves as hinges between school and society, mediating higher ed’s role in a democracy? Do we tolerate every private belief or hold ourselves to an epistemology premised on shared evidence and public scrutiny, what Jonathan Rauch calls the “Constitution of Knowledge”?

    As for an experience that’s good, higher ed’s 15-year-old success agenda focuses on access, affordability and student support. These aren’t enough. Quality must join the list, with a particular focus on our technical core: teaching and learning.

    Ask any of the nation’s 1.5 million professors and most will tell you they were not taught how to teach. They are world-class scholars. They serve their institutions. They are committed to students. But hardly any received comprehensive training in effective instruction. This persists despite the fact that most Americans believe the best colleges have the best teaching and evidence that effective instruction leads to more positive mindsets about one’s academic abilities, deeper learning, stronger retention and life readiness.

    As such, it’s no surprise that Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found, in Academically Adrift (University of Chicago Press), “limited learning on college campuses.” That was in 2010 and not enough has changed, as recent articles in USA Today, The Washington Post, Washington Monthly, Forbes, Deseret News and The Chronicle of Higher Education affirm.

    But change is afoot. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine soon plan to publish STEM teaching standards, a first. Groups like the Equity-Based Teaching Collective have identified policies and practices to promote effective teaching campuswide. Over the past 10 years, the Association of College and University Educators, which I co-founded, has credentialed 42,000 professors in effective teaching at 500 institutions nationwide with proof of positive student impact. Last June’s second National Higher Education Teaching Conference gathered hundreds of higher education leaders and professors to accelerate the teaching excellence movement.

    College as a “public good”? Let’s give the public what it wants and deserves: a good education. In which the “best” colleges aren’t, by definition, the most exclusive. So that at family gatherings, our students tell their voting, poll-taking relatives how much they are learning, how great their professors are and how college is for them.

    Jonathan Gyurko teaches politics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. His new book, Publicization: How Public and Private Interests Can Reinvent Education for the Common Good, was published by Teachers College Press last March.

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  • 22 ideas for department chair merit badges (opinion)

    22 ideas for department chair merit badges (opinion)

    A running joke with my department chairs, when I was a dean, involved the awarding of merit badges for the accomplishment of a particularly thorny task that the outside world (outside of academia, that is) would not otherwise have known about. Generals rising in the ranks of the military accumulate ribbons. Why shouldn’t there be a similar accumulation of ceremonial badges for accomplishments on the way up the academic leadership ladder?

    The granting of ribbons or merit badges will be ever more important in the AI era, in which leaders cannot simply speak about something but rather demonstrate and present the knowledge physically. As the Boy Scouts Merit Badge Hub states, “If it says ‘show or demonstrate,’ that is what you must do. Just telling about it isn’t enough. The same thing holds true for such words as ‘make,’ ‘list,’ ’in the field,’ and ‘collect,’ ‘identify,’ and ‘label.’”

    For example: Consider details of just two of the 12 areas Scouts must master to earn the Boy Scout Bird Study Merit Badge:

    Demonstrate that you know how to use a bird field guide. Show your counselor that you are able to understand a range map by locating in the book and pointing out the wintering range, the breeding range, and/or the year-round range of one species of each of the following types of birds:

    1. Seabird
    2. Plover
    3. Falcon or hawk
    4. Warbler or vireo
    5. Sparrow

    Observe and be able to identify at least 20 species of wild birds. Prepare a field notebook, making a separate entry for each species, and record the following information from your field observations and other references.

    1. Note the date and time.
    2. Note the location and habitat.
    3. Describe the bird’s main feeding habitat and list two types of food that the bird is likely to eat.
    4. Note whether the bird is a migrant or a summer, winter, or year-round resident of your area.

    When scouts earn a Bird Study merit badge, you will know they know what they’re talking about and feel comfortable with those scouts running a birding outing. You will feel confident putting matters in their hands.

    Wouldn’t this approach be helpful for showing department chair expertise as well?

    The Basic Badges: Survival Skills for New Chairs

    I propose the list below as standard merit badges any department chair should be working toward. Following the Bird Study merit badge model, the specific tasks involved in earning the first badge are listed in detail. Follow this model and logic if you decide to document and award any or all of these badges at your institution.

    Meeting Management Merit Badge (for mastering the art of running efficient faculty meetings while maintaining collegiality and reaching actual decisions)

    1. Show that you are familiar with the terms used to describe meetings by doing the following:
      1. Sketch or trace a meeting room and then label 15 different aspects of a meeting.
      2. Draw up a meeting agenda and label six types of agenda items.
    2. Demonstrate that you know how to properly follow an agenda, use the AV equipment in the room and use the hybrid camera, plus monitor for virtual attendees:
      1. Explain what the Roman numerals mean on an agenda.
      2. Show how to present a PowerPoint to both present and virtual members.
      3. Show how to see, in a timely manner, when a virtual hand is up.
      4. Describe how to bring a latecomer up to speed on an agenda item already discussed.
    3. Demonstrate that you know how to use Robert’s Rules of Order. Show your dean that you are able to understand each chapter in the book, pointing out the debate rules, the tabling-a-motion rules and the majority requirements for each of the following types of votes:
      1. Motion to accept minutes.
      2. Motion to object.
      3. Motion to suspend consideration of an item.
      4. Motion to call the question.
      5. Motion to take up matter previously tabled.
      6. Procedure to select a second when everyone’s hand is up.
    4. Observe and be able to identify at least 20 types of meetings. Prepare a field notebook, making a separate entry for each species of meeting, and record the following information from your field observations and other references:
      1. Note the date and time.
      2. Note the location and room capacity.
      3. Describe each attendee’s main feeding habitat and list two types of food that the attendees are likely to eat.
      4. Note whether the attendee is a tenure-line professor, career-line or part-time/adjunct resident of your department.
    5. Successfully defuse at least three of these common meeting scenarios:
      1. The Filibuster Professor who “just has a quick comment” that turns into a 20-minute monologue.
      2. The Side Conversation Insurgents who start their own parallel meeting.
      3. The “Actually …” Interrupter who must correct every minor detail.
      4. The Passive-Aggressive Email Sender who “just wants to follow up on some concerns.”

    Do you not feel comfortable with any department chair who has earned a Meeting Management merit badge running a meeting? Following are some additional basic badges that one can earn for adept engagement in the everyday and more occasional department chair work.

    Budget Detective Merit Badge (for successfully tracking down and reallocating mysterious fund transfers and finding hidden resources)

    Schedule Tetris Merit Badge (for fitting 47 course sections into 32 available time slots while satisfying everyone’s preferences)

    Diplomatic Relations Merit Badge (for mediating between feuding faculty members without taking sides or losing sanity)

    Paperwork Expedition Merit Badge (for successfully navigating a minor curriculum change through six committees and three levels of administration)

    Assessment Survival Merit Badge (for completing a program review cycle without uttering the phrase “this is meaningless”)

    Email Endurance Merit Badge (for maintaining inbox zero while receiving 200-plus daily messages during registration week)

    Faculty Development Sherpa Merit Badge (for successfully guiding junior faculty through the tenure process wilderness)

    Student Crisis Navigation Merit Badge (for handling everything from grade appeals to mental health emergencies with grace—and documentation)

    Accreditation Archive Merit Badge (for creating and maintaining the sacred assessment documents for the next site visit)

    Interdepartmental Peace Treaty Merit Badge (for negotiating shared resources and cross-listed courses without starting a turf war)

    Conference Room Warrior Merit Badge (for surviving 50 consecutive hours of committee meetings in a single semester while maintaining consciousness)

    The Advanced Badges

    As department chairs move toward the “seasoned category,” akin to Eagle Scouts’ level of capability, these are the advanced merit badges department chairs should be moving toward:

    Everyone Remained Seated Merit Badge (for successfully hosting a controversial speaker event where the Q&A didn’t require campus police, no one stormed out, everyone actually asked questions instead of making speeches, and the dean didn’t have to issue a statement the next day)

    Viewpoint Diversity Navigator Merit Badge (for successfully resolving ideological tensions between the “universities are too woke” faculty member and the “universities aren’t woke enough” faculty member, while keeping both the university counsel office and the campus newspaper uninterested in your department)

    Social Media Firefighter Merit Badge (for managing department communications after a faculty member’s tweet goes viral, while upholding both academic freedom and institutional reputation)

    Soft Landing Merit Badge (for compassionately guiding a struggling graduate student toward alternative career paths while avoiding lawsuits, maintaining departmental reputation for mentoring, preventing faculty infighting about “standards” and ensuring the student leaves with dignity and future options intact)

    Side Hustle Tackler Merit Badge (for successfully filling out outside employment forms for a professor simultaneously consulting for Google, running a resale textbook start-up and offering expert testimony, while ensuring university compliance, managing jealous colleagues and preventing the local newspaper from running a “professors don’t work” exposé)

    Advanced Curriculum Shepherding Merit Badge (for successfully shepherding an interdisciplinary, multimodal, study abroad–required curriculum through 17 different committees without having it transformed into “just add one elective to the existing major”)

    Bonus points for maintaining revolutionary elements like “required internships,” “community-engaged capstone” and “two semesters abroad” through final approval, while fielding questions like “but how will student athletes do this?” and “what exactly do you mean by ‘transdisciplinary’?” and “have you checked with Risk Management?” and “will this impact our parking situation?”

    Fresh Blood Without Bloodshed Merit Badge (for successfully integrating an outside chair into a department that has been “led” by the same three faculty trading the position since 1987; includes surviving the “but that’s not how we do it” phase, the “well, in my day as chair” phase and the “I’ll just CC the dean on this email to help you understand our culture better” phase)

    Special recognition for preventing the emeritus faculty from creating a shadow government in the department’s second-floor conference room.

    The King Has Voluntarily Left the Building Merit Badge (For masterfully orchestrating the graceful exit of a chair who has held the position since before email existed, memorized every bylaw and has an office containing 27 years of irreplaceable paper files organized in a system only they understand; successfully convince them that spending more time on research is a promotion, not a demotion, while ensuring they actually hand over the department credit card and graduate student admissions spreadsheet before leaving)

    Bonus points if the outgoing chair willingly shares the password to the department’s social media accounts and reveals where they’ve been hiding the good coffee maker.

    The “Reply All” Survivor Merit Badge (for maintaining composure during the dreaded accidental reply-all chain that encompasses the entire college)

    And, finally (drum roll) the Ultimate Achievement: The Phoenix Chair Merit Badge (for successfully completing a term as chair and willingly agreeing to serve again)

    This highest honor requires:

    1. Completing all previous merit badges
    2. Still believing in the mission of higher education
    3. Retaining enough optimism to sign up for another term

    Note: This badge has only been awarded twice in recorded higher education history.

    Hollis Robbins is professor of English and former dean of humanities at the University of Utah.


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  • A crisis of trust in the classroom (opinion)

    A crisis of trust in the classroom (opinion)

    It was the day after returning from Thanksgiving break. I’d been stewing that whole time over yet another case of cheating, and I resolved to do something about it. “Folks,” I said, “I just can’t trust you anymore.”

    After a strong start, many of the 160 mostly first-year students in my general education course had become, well, challenging. They’d drift in and out of the classroom. Many just stopped showing up. Those who did were often distracted and unfocused. I had to ask students to stop watching movies and to not play video games. Students demanded time to talk about how they were graded unfairly on one assignment or another but then would not show up for meetings. My beleaguered TAs sifted through endless AI-generated nonsense submitted for assignments that, in some cases, asked only for a sentence or two of wholly unsubstantiated opinion. One student photoshopped himself into a picture of a local museum rather than visiting it, as required by an assignment. I couldn’t even administer a simple low-stakes, in-class pen-and-paper quiz without a third of the students miraculously coming up with the same verbatim answers. Were they cheating? Somehow using AI? Had I simplified the quiz so much that these were the only possible answers? Had I simply become a victim of my own misplaced trust?

    I meant that word, “trust,” to land just so. For several weeks we had been surveying the history of arts and culture in Philadelphia. A key theme emerged concerning whether or not Philadelphians could trust culture leaders to put people before profit. We talked about the postwar expansion of local universities (including our own), the deployment of murals during the 1980s as an antigraffiti strategy and, most recently, the debate over whether or not the Philadelphia 76ers should be allowed to build an arena adjacent to the city’s historic Chinatown. In each case we bumped into hard questions about who really benefits from civic projects that supposedly benefit everyone.

    So, when I told my students that I couldn’t trust them anymore, I wanted them to know that I wasn’t just upset about cheating. What really worried me was the possibility that our ability to trust one another in the classroom had been derailed by the same sort of crass profiteering that explains why, for instance, so many of our neighbors’ homes get bulldozed and replaced with cheap student apartments. That in a class where I’d tried to teach them to be better citizens of our democracy, to discern public good from private profit, to see value in the arts and culture beyond their capacity to generate revenue, so many students kept trying to succeed by deploying the usual strategies of the profiteer—namely cheating and obfuscation.

    But could any of them hear this? Did it even matter? How many of my students, I wondered, would even show up if not for a chance to earn points? Maybe to them class is just another transaction. Like buying fries at the food truck and hoping to get a few extra just for waiting patiently?

    I decided to find out.

    With just a few sessions remaining, I offered everyone a choice: Pick Path A and I’d instantly give you full credit for all of the remaining assignments. All you had to do was join me for a class session’s worth of honest conversation about how to build a better college course. Pick Path B and I’d give you the same points, but you wouldn’t even have to show up! You could just give up, no questions asked, and not even have to come back to class. Just take the fries—er, the points—and go.

    The nervous chatter that followed showed me that, if nothing else, my offer got their attention. Some folks left immediately. Others gathered to ask if I was serious: “I really don’t have to come back, and I’ll still get the points?!” I assured them that there was no catch. When I left the room, I wondered if anyone would choose Path A. Later that day, I checked the results: Nearly 50 students had chosen to return. I was delighted!

    But how to proceed? For this to work I needed them to tell me what they really thought, rather than what they supposed I wanted to hear. My solution was an unconference. When the students returned, I’d ask each of them to take two sticky notes. On one they’d write something they loved about their college courses. On the other, they’d jot down something that frustrated them. The TAs and I would then stand at the whiteboard and arrange the notes into a handful of common themes. We’d ask everyone to gravitate toward whatever theme interested them most, gather with whomever they met there and then chat for a while about ways to augment the good and eliminate the bad. I’d sweep in toward the end to find out what everyone had come up with.

    So, what did I learn? Well, first off, I learned to temper my optimism. Although 50 students selected Path A, only 40 showed up for the discussion. And then about half of those folks opted to leave once they were entirely convinced that they could not earn additional points by remaining. To put it in starker terms, I learned that—in this instance—only about 15 percent of my students were willing to attend a regularly scheduled class if doing so didn’t present some specific opportunity for earning points toward their grades. Which is also to say that more than 85 percent of my students were content to receive points for doing absolutely nothing.

    There are many reasons why students may or may not have chosen to come back. The size of this sample though convinces me that college instructors are contending with dire problems related to how a rising generation of students understands learning. These are not problems that can be beaten back with new educational apps or by bemoaning AI. They are rather problems concerning citizenship, identity and the commodification of everything. They reflect a collapse of trust in institutions, knowledge and the self.

    I don’t fault my students for mistrusting me or the systems that we’ve come to rely on in the university. I too am skeptical about the integrity of our nation’s educational landscape. The real problem, however, is that the impossibility of trusting one another means that I cannot learn in any reliable way what the Path B students need for this situation to change.

    I can, however, learn from the Path A students, and one crucial lesson is that they exist. That is very good news! I learned, too, that the “good” students are not always the good students. The two dozen students who stuck it out were not, by and large, the students I expected to remain. I’d say that just about a third of the traditionally high-performing students came back without incentive. It’s an important reminder to all of us that surviving the classroom by teaching to only those students who appear to care is a surefire way to alienate others who really do.

    Some of what the Path A students taught me I’ve known for a long time. They react very favorably, for instance, to professors who make content immediate, interesting and personal. They feel betrayed by professors who read from years-old PowerPoints and will sit through those courses in silent resentment. Silence, in fact, appeared as a theme throughout our conversation. Many students are terrified to speak aloud in front of people they do not know or trust. They are also unsure about how to meet people or how to know if the people they meet can be trusted. None of us should be surprised that trust and communication are entwined. Thinking more fully about how they get bound up with the classroom will, for me, be a critical task going forward.

    I learned also that students appreciate an aspect of my teaching that I absolutely detest: They love when I publicly call out the disrupters and the rule breakers. They like it, that is, when I police the classroom. From my standpoint, having to be the heavy feels like a pedagogical failure. My sense is that a well-run classroom should prevent most behavior problems from occurring in the first place. Understandably, committed students appreciate when I ensure a fair and safe learning environment. But I have to wonder whether the Path A students’ appetite for schadenfreude reflects deeper problems: an unwillingness to confront difficulty, a disregard for the commonwealth, an immoderate desire for spectacle. Teaching is always a performance. But maybe what meanings our performances convey aren’t always what we think.

    By far, though, the most striking and maybe most troubling lesson I gathered during our unconference was this: Students do not know how to read. Technically they can understand printed text, and surely more than a few can do better than that. But the Path A students confirmed my sense that most if not a majority of my students were unable to reliably discern key concepts and big-picture meaning from, say, a 20-page essay written for an educated though nonspecialist audience. I’ve experienced this problem elsewhere in my teaching, and so I planned for it this time around by starting very slow. Our first reading was a short bit of journalism; the second was an encyclopedia entry. We talked about reading strategy and discussed methods for wrangling with difficult texts. But even so, I pretty quickly hit their limit. Weekly reading quizzes and end-of-week writing assignments called “connect the dots” showed me that most students simply could not.

    Concerns about declining literacy in the classroom are certainly not new. But what struck me in this moment was the extent to which the Path A students were fully aware of their own illiteracy, how troubled they were by it and how betrayed they feel by former teachers who assured them they were ready for college. During our discussion, students expressed how relieved they were when, late in the semester, I relented and substituted audio and video texts for planned readings. They want help learning how to read but are unsure of where or how to get it. There is a lot of embarrassment, shame and fear associated with this issue. Contending with it now must be a top priority for all of us.

    I learned so much more from our Path A unconference. In one of many lighthearted moments, for instance, we all heard from some international students about how “bonkers” they think the American students are. We’ve had a lot of laughs this semester, in fact, and despite the challenges, I’ve really enjoyed the work. But knowing what the work is, or needs to be, has never been harder. I want my students to see their world in new ways. They want highly individualized learning experiences free of confrontation and anxiety. I offer questions; they want answers. I beg for honesty; they demand points.

    Like it or not, cutting deals for points means that I’m stuck in the same structures of profit that they are. But maybe that’s the real lesson. Sharing something in common, after all, is an excellent first step toward building trust. Maybe even the first step down a new path.

    Seth C. Bruggeman is a professor of history and director of the Center for Public History at Temple University.

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  • Career planning advice for grad students/mentors (opinion)

    Career planning advice for grad students/mentors (opinion)

    lvcandy/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

    As a trained scientist, I had a fantastic research mentor. We talked about my research project, which experiments to prioritize and what the data meant, and we even sometimes discussed personal things like family and ties to home. When I joined his lab, I was open with my mentor about my interest in a teaching career and my desire to run a small research program working primarily with undergraduates. However, my career aspirations evolved over the course of my graduate training, and I found myself hesitant to share my new career goals. Though I recognized that my interactions with my mentor were quite positive and supportive, I still feared that sharing my non–academic scientist aspirations would somehow disappoint him, or worse, that I wouldn’t get the fullest support for my research training.

    Now, as a career development professional who advises biomedical Ph.D. students, I see this same pattern often. Students express feeling comfortable discussing their research and academic endeavors with their research mentors but hesitate when it comes to discussing career plans outside academic research. They fear not receiving the same level of support and training, letting their mentor down, or being seen as less committed to their research and academic pursuits.

    While I find these feelings familiar, I now encourage students to push past these fears. Students can receive valuable guidance and access to further opportunities when they engage in career conversations with their mentors. I also advocate for research mentors to be intentional about incorporating career planning into their training and mentoring conversations. What follows is advice for both students and research mentors for having more productive and positive career conversations.

    For Students

    Having career conversations is a professional skill you can learn.

    The first thing you need to know is you are not alone. Feeling apprehensive about talking to your mentor about your career is completely normal, especially if you have not engaged in these conversations before or if you are expressing a desire to explore careers outside academia. Even if your mentor hasn’t followed the career path you’re considering, they can still offer guidance, opportunities to help you develop transferable skills and connections within their network who may offer inroads into other career sectors.

    Start career conversations early. Waiting until you’re rushing to graduate or scrambling for the next step often results in missed opportunities to prepare effectively. Starting these conversations early gives you time to explore different options, take advantage of targeted learning opportunities and make more informed decisions. For example, you could start the conversation with your mentor by saying, “I’ve been learning about careers in science policy and how Ph.D.s can impact policy and regulatory rules in government roles. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this type of career and any advice you might have for exploring it further.” This approach invites your mentor to join the conversation as a collaborator and can set the stage for regular career conversations.

    Engage in reverse mentorship. Instead of assuming your mentor cannot help with careers outside academia, consider this an opportunity to take a proactive approach in researching career options and sharing what you learn with your mentor. This can help educate your mentor and also serve as a springboard to discuss transferable skills and potential opportunities. For example, you might say, “I’ve been learning about career opportunities for Ph.D.s in biotech project management roles. These positions value skills like leadership, data interpretation and cross-functional communication. Could we talk about how I might develop these skills further in my current work?” This approach positions you as an active learner and invites your mentor to help you acquire the skills you need. As your mentor learns about the transferable skills most relevant to your career preparation, it may also lead to opportunities where you and your mentor can align your research endeavors with skills needed for your future.

    Use an individual development plan to guide regular conversations. Having one career conversation is a great start, but ideally you would have these conversations on a more regular basis. An IDP is a great tool for structuring regular career discussions with your mentor and is often used on an annual or semiannual basis. The IDP can guide you to reflect on your career interests, identify skills you want to develop and set clear, actionable goals. You can then share and discuss your IDP with your mentor during regular check-ins to seek their advice on your goals and progress. This provides a collaborative approach to your career planning, keeps your discussions focused and over all helps you both be more transparent with your planning. Many Ph.D. programs provide their own customized IDPs that incorporate research and career planning. Another widely used resource is the myIDP tool from Science Careers, which provides a step-by-step framework for self-assessment, career exploration and goal-setting.

    For Research Mentors

    You can support career discussions, even outside your area of expertise.

    For research mentors, it’s understandable that these conversations can feel daunting when you don’t have experience in the career fields your students are interested in. However, mentors don’t need to be experts in every career to provide students with meaningful support, valuable connections and opportunities for skill enhancement.

    Normalize career discussions. Encourage your student to talk about their career aspirations early in the mentoring relationship and be supportive of careers outside of academia. This signals to your student that their career is just as important as their research, and you’re invested in helping them succeed whether they choose an academic career or not. You can start by simply saying, “I know your interests may change throughout your studies, but what are some career options you are currently considering after graduate school?” Asking your student what they are considering is a much less intimidating question than “What do you want to do or be?” It also invites your student to be more open with what they are thinking and creates space for their choices to evolve as they gain further experiences.

    Ask questions and offer connections. Even if you don’t know much about, say, a career in science communication or technology commercialization, you can still ask reflective questions to help your student clarify their goals. Asking, “What excites you about this path?” or “What skills do you think are important in that field?” shows interest and invites further conversation. If possible, you can then connect them with lab alumni or professionals in your network who may have more expertise in that specific career field. Your institution may also have a career development office that you can refer your student to for further career-readiness support. If you truly don’t know about the career, sharing a willingness to learn can set the stage for productive conversations in the future.

    Recognize the value of transferable skills. Your student is learning a wealth of skills in their academic and research experiences. As their mentor, you can assist your student in understanding how the research skills they’re developing—such as critical thinking, data analysis, grant writing and project management—can apply broadly across many careers. Additionally, as your student identifies skills they will need in the specific career they are targeting, you may be able to help them gain experiences honing those skills. The student interested in scientific writing may become your go-to person for editing, and together you can plan to have the student lead efforts on a comprehensive review and assist more with grant writing. Or you may ask the student aspiring to move into data science to take on a project analyzing large data sets and give them more opportunities to practice their programming skills. When you align transferable skill development with research endeavors, you’re actively supporting your student’s career goals in a way that is productive for both of you.

    Acknowledge that career choices are based on personal and professional goals. Your student’s career decisions are based on both their personal priorities as well as their professional ambitions. Family planning, financial stability, caregiving responsibilities, health needs, visa restrictions or a need for geographic flexibility are just a few of the many factors that influence career decision-making. If you treat these considerations as unimportant or secondary to research, you will not adequately help your student navigate key factors in their long-term career decision-making. However, encouraging your student to integrate both personal and professional priorities into their career planning demonstrates an investment in them as a whole person and supports them in making thoughtful and sustainable career choices aligned with their personal needs.

    Coda

    I still remember my own mentor’s reaction when I finally shared my career goals. He admitted that he didn’t know much about the career I wanted to pursue—academic administration—but he then reassured me of his support. It turned out that I didn’t need to be nervous about this conversation. He was happy to provide supportive recommendation letters, help me make connections, serve as a positive job reference and offer general job-seeking advice. I graduated shortly thereafter, and his support played a critical role in landing positions early in my career. My only regret when I think back to my time as a graduate student is knowing that I could have begun to have these career conversations sooner.

    Raquel Y. Salinas is the director of student affairs and career development at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is a member of the Graduate Career Consortium, an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • A path to wellness for women of color in higher ed (opinion)

    A path to wellness for women of color in higher ed (opinion)

    I often ignore my well-being—mind, body and spirit—while advancing my academic career. As a woman of color academic, balancing work and life feels very hard. My personal and professional lives are tangled, pulling at me in tiring ways. Relaxing seems wrong, and resting feels like a luxury.

    I get so caught up in meetings and deadlines that on a typical day I often skip lunch. I forget to drink water and don’t even step outside for fresh air. My self-care plan has been “out of sight, out of mind.”

    Now, in my 40s, I see the toll this has taken. I struggle with muscle spasms, neck pain, mental health issues and deep exhaustion. The hardest part? My six-year-old daughter says, “Mom works a lot.”

    Enter Slow Living: A Revolutionary Recalibration

    The slow living movement, rooted in the slow food movement, promotes a lifestyle centered on mindfulness, sustainability and quality over quantity. It encourages us to slow down and make intentional choices in a world that often values speed and productivity. This philosophy emphasizes the importance of relationships, well-being and balance.

    For women of color in academia, slow living practices provide a means to counteract the intense pressures of teaching, administration, funding and publication. These pressures are heightened by systemic challenges such as microaggressions, tokenism, code-switching and the obligation to mentor students from similar backgrounds. This leads to cultural taxation and the demands of invisible labor, resulting in increased stress and burnout. The slow living approach promotes self-care and helps us reconnect with what truly matters, enhancing resilience and mental well-being.

    The Invisible Burdens Women of Color Carry

    Women of color in academia often face unique challenges that remain invisible to many of their peers. For example, the overwhelming burden of service work, particularly mentoring students of color, frequently contributes to feelings of isolation and burnout. While mentorship is vital and rewarding, it takes a significant toll, contributing to a sense of alienation, invisible labor and racial battle fatigue. The emotional and intellectual labor involved often detracts from time that could otherwise be spent on research, teaching or personal pursuits. Addressing these issues requires a deeper understanding of systemic obstacles and intentional efforts to foster equitable academic environments.

    Furthermore, women of color academics often encounter challenges related to tokenism within predominantly white academic settings. Their roles can be perceived as symbolic, which leads to the expectation that they represent entire racial or ethnic communities. Faculty of color are frequently called upon to address student concerns regarding racism or to spearhead diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, a burden not equally shared by their white colleagues.

    Moreover, microaggressions—subtle yet harmful discriminatory behaviors—can create an environment in which faculty of color feel compelled to continually validate their competence. These experiences highlight the need for systemic change to cultivate a more inclusive atmosphere where women of color faculty can thrive and contribute their invaluable perspectives.

    The Slow Living Solution

    The principles of slow living offer women of color academics a robust way to reclaim their time and energy, enabling them to focus on their well-being, passions and purpose. Embracing slow living practices may aid us in navigating the often overwhelming demands of academic life with greater intention and balance, which may amplify self-agency.

    Mindfulness practices such as morning meditation or walking in nature can provide essential moments of peace. Setting boundaries, saying “no” to additional commitments and taking mental health days are other strategies that allow academics to preserve their energy. Intentional time management helps reduce stress and ensures alignment with personal values, creating a more fulfilling academic experience. Institutional support for mindful practices can be crucial in promoting the well-being and retention of women of color faculty by creating environments that prioritize self-care, work-life balance and mental health.

    Slow living enhances career satisfaction by aligning daily tasks with long-term goals. Reflecting on work can help identify opportunities that bring purpose and joy, like prioritizing collaborative projects that match personal values. A model that reflects this intentional approach is transformational leadership in academia. This model focuses on leaders encouraging collaboration, promoting shared goals and emphasizing personal growth and well-being. Women of color faculty may use this model to engage in work that is aligned with their values and supported by institutional leadership, promoting meaningful collaboration and decreasing the likelihood of feeling disconnected or burned out.

    Incorporating slow living into academia can inspire a ripple effect across departments and institutions. Women of color faculty prioritizing well-being and balance set a powerful example for colleagues and students. These shifts can foster a culture that values mental health and personal fulfillment as much as professional achievement. Over time, tailored slow-living principles could encourage academic institutions to reimagine success metrics, emphasizing sustainability, collaboration and community impact.

    From Individual Change to Institutional Transformation

    Slow living can’t flourish in a vacuum. For women of color faculty to thrive, institutions must provide meaningful support. Structural changes can transform individual efforts into a sustainable culture shift—and, honestly, wouldn’t academia be better off for it?

    Institutions can enhance the well-being and retention of women of color faculty through several structural changes. Implementing flexible work policies, such as remote teaching and flexible hours, helps faculty manage their professional and personal lives. A holistic approach to tenure and promotion that values work-life balance, teaching quality, mentorship and community impact fosters inclusivity. Mentorship programs and employee affinity groups provide essential support and collaboration. Additionally, dedicated mental health resources help mitigate burnout. Programs like the Advancing Faculty Diversity initiative at the University of California celebrate (and fund) faculty DEI contributions. Finally, incentivizing collaborative work can shift success metrics to prioritize impactful contributions, benefiting faculty and institutions.

    A Paradigm Shift Worth Embracing

    After years of pushing myself to the limit, I realized it was time for a change. While moving to a peaceful countryside cottage wasn’t possible, I discovered that small daily habits could transform my busy life. I started by walking: Each morning, I would take a 10-minute walk through my neighborhood, paying attention to the rhythm of my steps and allowing myself to immerse in the present moment fully. I also began typing slower, breathing mindfully and speaking intentionally. These simple changes introduced mindfulness, making me feel less frantic about productivity and helping me prioritize quality family time.

    Embracing slow living in my professional life has been a game-changer. It’s helped me focus on well-being and redefine success as living better rather than just doing more. As academics, we should celebrate lifelong learning and incorporate slow living into our lives. After all, if we’re too busy to care for ourselves, what are we truly working for?

    So here’s my challenge to you, dear reader: Take a deep breath. Walk a little slower. Break away from the chime of an email sitting in your inbox. Speak with intention. Let’s rewrite the script that tells us we must hustle to the point of harm. Our careers, families and, most importantly, we are worth it.

    Kenyatta Y. Dawson is a program director and faculty member at Texas Woman’s University. She specializes in diversity, equity, inclusion, student success and professional development in higher education. Her research focuses on mentoring adult learners, career satisfaction and equity-driven leadership. Grateful to Texas Woman’s University’s Women’s Thought Leadership Program for advancing underrepresented voices, Dawson embraces the Write to Change the World mission for inclusivity and social impact.

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  • The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    The hypocrisy of community-engaged research (opinion)

    Any critique about the neoliberal university ought to confront and acknowledge its colonial roots. Victoria Reyes, in her book Academic Outsider (Stanford University Press, 2022), highlights that higher education was never designed for the global majority, particularly people of color from low-income backgrounds. It was built by and for the elite—predominantly white, cisgender, male and affluent individuals—whose privilege shaped the norms that dominate higher education today. These norms actively harm oppressed communities. People of color in positions of power within higher education, such as tenured faculty or administrators, often perpetuate these systems of oppression when they conform to institutional norms instead of challenging them.

    The positivist research paradigm (a.k.a. positivism) sustains oppression in academia by prioritizing quantifiable data while dismissing subjective experiences and social contexts in pursuit of “objective” truths. This fragmented approach erases the complexity of lived experiences and ignores the interplay of privilege and oppression in shaping identities. Positivism fuels deficit-based research, white saviorism and helicopter science, invalidating diverse epistemologies and methodologies. Deficit-based research highlights negative conditions in oppressed communities, framing them as lacking while ignoring systemic causes of inequities, such as settler colonialism and structural racism. Legacies of positivism reinforce harmful stereotypes and stigmatization toward communities of color in higher education.

    In contrast, a transformative paradigm offers an alternative to positivism by centering the voices and experiences of oppressed communities. It prioritizes knowledge democracy and dismantling of power imbalances that have historically excluded marginalized communities from the research process. Over the past 25 years, community-engaged research (CEnR) and community-based participatory research (CBPR) have emerged as crucial approaches in health education, public health and the social sciences to address social inequities. Both approaches emphasize equitable, reciprocal community-academic partnerships, to foster genuine collaboration and systemic change.

    As a woman of color from the Global South and an immigrant scientist who studies health equity, I have witnessed firsthand both the transformative potential of CEnR in addressing social injustice and the discriminatory practices that neoliberal universities perpetuate in my own research with low-income and immigrant communities of color. While CEnR and CBPR are integral to addressing complex health and social inequities by empowering communities and fostering sustainable interventions, a question remains: Can these approaches thrive within the neoliberal university?

    White Saviorism and the Neoliberal University

    Unfortunately, the rise of CEnR within neoliberal universities, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, was driven not by a genuine shift toward equity, but by a desire for funding and institutional prestige. As Megan Snider Bailey notes, “Market forces … shape university-community partnerships,” reinforcing a colonial mindset rooted in the white savior complex. This complex positions universities as gatekeepers of resources and legitimacy, exploiting oppressed communities under the appearance of “helping” them to secure funding from entities like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.

    The white savior complex describes privileged individuals, often white, who see themselves as “saviors” or “benevolent rescuers” of oppressed communities. This paternalistic mindset creates exploitative dynamics and replicates patterns of subjugation. For instance, universities often profit significantly from research with oppressed communities, taking up to 50 percent of grant funds as indirect costs for expenses such as facility maintenance and administration. These funds rarely return to the communities that need them most. Instead, universities divert these resources to maintain their own operations, exposing the hypocrisy of institutions that claim to support equity and justice. These exploitative practices raise a critical question: Who benefits the most from the oppression and illness of communities of color?

    The answer often points back to the universities themselves. They profit from the appearance of equity while perpetuating social injustice. The harm caused by white saviorism extends beyond finances. Transactional and extractive research methods are normalized in the neoliberal university. These methods reinforce patterns of subjugation and undermine long-term partnerships that could foster social justice and radical healing. As scholars have shown, a human-centered, liberatory approach must replace the transactional and extractive methods often associated with white supremacy and settler colonialism.

    Precarity in the Academy

    Universities that claim to promote social justice and CEnR often perpetuate exploitative practices and precarious working conditions. They frequently hire community leaders, promotoras de salud (community health workers), students and scholars of color on short-term contracts with little job security and no benefits. These precarious positions create dependency on higher institutions that exploit labor while controlling access to resources.

    As Anne Cafer and Meagen Rosenthal explain, moral outrage often drives short-term involvement in community projects. CEnR that fails to address inequitable power dynamics becomes another tool of oppression disguised as allyship. Superficial, performative community-academic partnerships deepen mistrust of academic institutions in oppressed communities and reinforce power dynamics and social injustice.

    Raquel Wright-Mair and Samuel Museus highlight how academia’s power hierarchies instill a fear of retaliation, silencing junior scholars of color from challenging systemic inequities. Scholars of color are often forced to align their work with institutional goals while sickening their bodies and damaging their mental health. The market-driven model of the neoliberal university prioritizes profits and productivity, limiting justice-oriented research. To address these issues in higher education, we must ask urgent questions:

    • What can we do to dismantle white-led initiatives that perpetuate dependence and subjugation?
    • How can institutions eliminate the white savior complex embedded in their structures?
    • How can we ensure fair calculation of indirect costs in CEnR that prevent the exploitation of community needs for grant funding and institutional prestige?

    Recommendations for Conducting Respectful and Liberatory CEnR

    The neoliberal university perpetuates the white savior complex, commodifies community needs and exploits people of color through short-term appointments designed to maintain systemic inequities. Therefore, it is pivotal to embrace the liberatory nature of CEnR that prioritizes social justice and structural change.

    • Transformative practices. Researchers must critically reflect on how their own positionality and privilege influence the liberation or oppression of marginalized communities. Universities must recognize and amplify the expertise of community members in shaping research agendas and outcomes. Furthermore, institutions must actively embrace linguistic justice and culturally relevant methods, respecting the languages, traditions and cultural contexts of the communities they engage. By prioritizing these practices, institutions can foster decolonial, respectful and inclusive collaborations that effectively challenge and dismantle oppressive systems in higher education.
    • Accountability is essential. Funding agencies must prioritize equitable representation and tangible benefits for communities over superficial metrics when evaluating CEnR. Neoliberal universities must stop exploiting community researchers and scholars of color through precarious, short-term appointments that reinforce tokenization and systemic inequities. Universities often hire people of color temporarily to build trust for community-academic partnerships while maintaining the overrepresentation of white faculty. To disrupt this cycle, funding agencies must require universities to intentionally hire and retain leaders, scholars and students from oppressed communities, ensuring they have job security. Empowering these voices permits CEnR to address community-specific needs, build local infrastructure and foster authentic partnerships rooted in equity, respect and shared power, dismantling the traditional hierarchies of academic research.
    • Rejecting unpaid labor is nonnegotiable. Unpaid labor perpetuates inequities, exploiting oppressed communities. Ethical CEnR demands equitable compensation, collaboration and empowerment, ensuring all participants are treated with dignity and are compensated fairly. These principles are critical to advancing liberation and driving systemic change.

    Advancing CEnR that truly serves oppressed communities requires dismantling the colonial, patriarchal and exploitative structures underpinning higher education. Embracing a transformative paradigm prioritizes genuine representation, community needs and liberation over market-driven motives, creating a model for lasting social change and liberation in an increasingly inequitable world.

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  • Roundup of select spring university press titles (opinion)

    Roundup of select spring university press titles (opinion)

    Johns Hopkins University Press/MIT Press/University Press of Kentucky/Duke University Press/Princeton University Press/University of Minnesota Press/University of California Press

    More catalogs from university presses started arriving almost immediately after the last roundup of spring titles appeared—and in going through them, a couple of topical clusters of books struck me as notable. Here is a quick overview. Quoted passages come from material provided by the publishers.

    What do ant colonies, online subcultures, the publishing industry and the device you are using to read this all have in common? Each is, in some sense, a network embedded in still wider networks. They, like myriad other phenomena, can be depicted in geometric diagrams in which the components of a system (“vertices”) are connected by lines (“edges”) representing interactions or relationships.

    Researchers across many disciplines understand how systems and processes can be conceptualized as networks. The lay public, on the whole, does not. Anthony Bonato’s Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature (Hopkins University Press, May) aims to bring nonspecialist readers up to speed on elements of the network perspective. Everything from “Bitcoin transactions to neural connections” and “political landscapes to climate patterns” can be mapped via dots and lines. The author’s use of demotic labels seems well-advised, given that “Vertices and Edges” seems much less commercially viable as a title.

    Some networks make it a priority to remain diagrammable, of course. Isak Ladegaard’s Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld (University of California Press, May) looks into the “military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies” enabling “shadowy groups to organize collective action.” Examples include dark-web markets for illegal drugs, the activities of online hate groups and the efforts of Chinese citizens to remain connected to parts of the internet blocked by the Great Firewall. In each case, those running stealth networks “move through cyberspace like digital nomads, often with law enforcement and other powerful actors on their tails.”

    Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, June) offers “a new theory of meaning in language and computation” applicable to the production of texts by artificial intelligence based on large language models.

    Generative AI “does not simulate cognition, as widely believed,” he argues, “but rather creates culture” instead of just shuffling together fragments of it. (This is perhaps as good an occasion as any to issue my prediction that 2025 will see the first best-selling novel written by an AI algorithm.)

    On an altogether more dire note, Daniel Oberhaus’s The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, February) warns that the use of AI in psychiatry has shown “vanishingly little evidence” of improving patient outcomes. The problem is not one of engineering but of programming: The algorithms incorporate “deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale,” posing “significant risks to vulnerable people.”

    In old-school psychodynamic therapy, what’s said during the consultation does not leave the room. The author warns that a “psychiatric surveillance economy” is emerging, one “in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms.”

    Doubling down on a strictly defined and vigilantly enforced understanding of sex and gender as binary is high on the MAGA cultural agenda. A few books out this spring insist on the ambiguities and complexities, even so.

    Agustín Fuentes offers perhaps the most basic challenge to traditional assumptions with Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary (Princeton University Press, May). Arguing on the basis of recent scientific research, the book “explain[s] why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed,” with “compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures.”

    The ability to survive and thrive in unwelcoming circumstances is a focus of the writings collected in To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, April), edited by Rae Garringer. The term “two-spirit” refers to a nonbinary gender category recognized among some Indigenous peoples in North America. Contributors discuss “themes of erasure, environmentalism, violence, kinship, racism, Indigeneity, queer love, and trans liberation” in Appalachia, exploring “the writers’ resilience in reconciling their complex and often contradictory connections to home.”

    Transgender philosophy is covered at some length in an entry recently added to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Talia Mae Bettcher, whose work figures prominently in the entry’s bibliography, continues her work in the field with Beyond Personhood (University of Minnesota Press, March), presenting “a theory of intimacy and distance” that proposes “an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity.”

    Engineering and programming enter transgender studies’ already interdisciplinary ambit with Oliver L. Haimson’s Trans Technologies (MIT Press, February), which draws on the author’s “in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology” for trans people, showing “how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges.” From the book’s description and the author’s published articles, it seems that the technology in question tends to be digital: social networks, games, extended reality systems (akin to virtual reality but with additional capacities). The book also considers the factors shaping, and in some cases restricting, innovation in trans tech.

    To close this list, there’s The Dream of a Common Movement (Duke University Press, April), a collection of writings by and interviews with Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022) edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman. Urvashi Vaid was a feminist and a civil rights advocate whose work “over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ movement.” Her perspective that “the goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation” seems compatible with an older principle, which holds that an injury to one is an injury to all.

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

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  • DOL Wage and Hour Division Publishes First Opinion Letter Under Biden Administration, Regarding FMLA Leave – CUPA-HR

    DOL Wage and Hour Division Publishes First Opinion Letter Under Biden Administration, Regarding FMLA Leave – CUPA-HR

    by CUPA-HR | February 21, 2023

    On February 9, the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) issued an opinion letter stating that employees with chronic serious health conditions may use Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) leave to reduce work hours indefinitely. The WHD opinion letters serve as a means by which the public can develop a clearer understanding of what FMLA compliance entails. This particular letter is the first issued by the Biden administration.

    The letter from the WHD and Acting Administrator Jessica Looman comes in response to an employer’s letter asking whether “an employee may use FMLA leave to limit their work schedule for an indefinite period of time if the employee has a chronic serious health condition and a healthcare provider certifies that the employee has a medical need to limit their schedule.” The question only applies to employees who are regularly scheduled to work more than eight hours per day.

    The opinion letter specifies that if an employee is regularly scheduled to work more than eight hours per day but has an FMLA-qualifying condition that grants them to take FMLA leave, then the employee is entitled to use the 12 weeks of FMLA leave to reduce their work hours to eight hours per day. It adds that an employee may indefinitely reduce their work hours so long as they don’t surpass the 12 weeks of FMLA leave in a 12-month period that they are entitled to under the law.

    The letter also addresses concerns from the employer that the need for a work day limited to eight hours may be “better suited” as a reasonable accommodation granted under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The letter states that the requirements and protections of the FMLA and ADA are separate and distinct, and that employees may be entitled to use protections granted under both laws at the same time. It further states that an employee who has exhausted all of the afforded FMLA leave for a 12-month period may have additional rights granted under the ADA to continue to work at the reduced level, but it clarifies that the WHD does not “interpret or provide any advice for” the ADA and its requirements.

    Finally, the letter states that employees are entitled to the equivalent of 12 standard workweeks of FMLA leave, which may be more than 480 hours (equivalent to working 40 hours per week for 12 weeks) if the regular schedule of the employee is greater than 40 hours per week. The letter uses an example of an employee regularly working 50 hours per week, in which case the employee would be entitled to 600 hours of FMLA leave.

    It’s worth noting that the content of the letter is consistent with long-standing guidance and enforcement of the FMLA. The letter may draw increased attention to the issue, however, since the letter is the first provided by the Biden administration’s WHD.

    CUPA-HR will continue to monitor for any future WHD opinion letters and will keep members apprised of any significant updates in the future.



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