Tag: opinion

  • What’s So Conservative About Civics, Anyway? (opinion)

    What’s So Conservative About Civics, Anyway? (opinion)

    Amid rising political violence, the need for nonpartisan civic education has never been clearer. Yet saying, “civic thought” or “civic life and leadership” now reads conservative. Should it?

    With the backing of a legislature his party dominated, Republican governor Doug Ducey created Arizona State University’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2016. Both SCETL and its founding director, Paul Carrese, are now understood as key leaders in a movement for civic schools and centers.

    In a March 2024 special issue on civic engagement in the journal Laws, Caresse outlines a deepening American civic crisis, including as evidence, “the persistent appeal of the demagogic former President Donald Trump.”

    He’s not exactly carrying water for the MAGA movement.

    Whether MAGA should be considered conservative is part of the puzzle. If by “conservative” we mean an effort to honor that which has come before us, to preserve that which is worth preserving and to take care when stepping forward, civic education has an inherently conservative lineage.

    But even if we dig back more than a half century, it can be difficult to disentangle the preservation of ideals from the practices of partisanship. The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s to promote classical liberalism, including commitments to individual freedom and dignity, limited government, and the rule of law. It has been part of George Mason University since 1985, receiving millions from the Charles Koch Foundation.

    Earlier this year, IHS president and CEO Emily Chamlee-Wright asserted that President Trump’s “tariff regime isn’t just economically harmful—it reverses the moral and political logic that made trade a foundation of the American experiment.” Rather than classifying that column through a partisan lens, we might consider a more expansive query: Is it historically accurate and analytically robust? Does it help readers understand intersections among the rule of law, individual freedom and dignity?

    The editors at Persuasion, which ran the column, certainly would seem to think so. But Persuasion also has a bent toward “a free society,” “free speech” and “free inquiry,” and against “authoritarian populism.” The founder, Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has been a persistent center-left critic of what he and others deem the excesses of the far left. Some of the challenges they enumerate made it into Steven Pinker’s May opinion piece in The New York Times, in which Pinker defended Harvard’s overwhelming contributions to global humanity while also admitting to instances of political narrowness; Pinker wrote that a poll of his colleagues “turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research in their specialties.” Has political narrowness manifested within the operating assumptions of the civic engagement movement?

    Toward the beginning of this century, award-winning researchers Joel Westheimer and Joseph Kahne pushed for a social change–oriented civic education. Writing in 2004, in the American Educational Research Journal, they described their predispositions as such: “We find the exclusive emphasis on personally responsible citizenship when estranged from analysis of social, political, and economic contexts … inadequate for advancing democracy. There is nothing inherently democratic about the traits of a personally responsible citizen … From our perspective, traits associated with participatory and justice oriented citizens, on the other hand, are essential.”

    Other scholars have also pointed to change as an essential goal of civic education. In 1999, Thomas Deans provided an overview of the field of service learning and civic engagement. He noted dueling influences of John Dewey and Paulo Freire across the field, writing, “They overlap on several key characteristics essential to any philosophy of service-learning,” including “an anti-foundationalist epistemology” and “an abiding hope for social change through education combined with community action.”

    Across significant portions of the fields of education, service learning and community engagement, the penchant toward civic education as social change had become dominant by 2012, when I inhabited an office next to Keith Morton at Providence College. It had been nearly 20 years since Morton completed an empirical study of different modes of community service—charity, project and social change—finding strengths and integrity within each. By the time we spoke, Morton observed that much of the field had come to (mis)interpret his study as suggesting a preference for social change over project or charity work.

    While service learning and community engagement significantly embraced this progressive orientation, these pedagogies were also assumed to fulfill universities’ missional commitments to civic education. Yet the link between community-engaged learning and education for democracy was often left untheorized.

    In 2022, Carol Geary Schneider, president emerita of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, cited real and compounding fractures in U.S. democracy. Shortly thereafter in the same op-ed, Geary Schneider wrote, “two decades of research on the most common civic learning pedagogy—community-based projects completed as part of a ‘service learning’ course—show that student participation in service learning: 1) correlates with increased completion, 2) enhances practical skills valued by employers and 3) builds students’ motivation to help solve public problems.”

    All three of these outcomes are important, but to what end? The first serves university retention goals, the second supports student career prospects and the third contributes broadly to civic learning. Yet civic learning does not necessarily contribute to the knowledge, skills, attitudes and beliefs necessary to sustain American democracy.

    There is nothing inherently democratic about a sea of empowered individuals, acting in pursuit of their separate conceptions of the good. All manner of people do this, sometimes in pursuit of building more inclusive communities, and other times to persecute one another. Democratic culture, norms, laws and policies channel energies toward ends that respect individual rights and liberties.

    Democracy is not unrestrained freedom for all from all. It is institutional and cultural arrangements advancing individual opportunities for empowerment, tempered by an abiding respect for the dignity of other persons, grounded in the rule of law. Commitment to one another’s empowerment starts from that foundational assumption that all people are created equal. All other democratic rights and obligations flow from that well.

    Proponents of civic schools and centers have wanted to see more connections to foundational democratic principles and the responsibilities inherent in stewarding an emergent, intentionally aspirational democratic legacy.

    In a paper published by the American Enterprise Institute, Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey consider next steps for the movement advancing civic schools and centers, while also emphasizing responsibility-taking as part of democratic citizenship. They write, “By understanding our institutions of constitutional government, our characteristic political philosophy, and the history of American politics in practice as answers to the challenging, even paradoxical questions posed by the effort to govern ourselves, we enter into the perspective of responsibility—the citizen’s proper perspective as one who participates in sovereign oversight of, and takes responsibility for, the American political project. The achievement of such a perspective is the first object of civic education proper to the university.”

    This sounds familiar. During the Obama administration, the Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement National Task Force called for the “cultivation of foundational knowledge about fundamental principles and debates about democracy.” More than a half century before, the Truman Commission’s report on “Higher Education for American Democracy” declared, “In the past our colleges have perhaps taken it for granted that education for democratic living could be left to courses in history and political science. It should become instead a primary aim of all classroom teaching and, more important still, of every phase of campus life.” And in the era of the U.S. founding, expanding access to quality education was understood as central to the national, liberatory project of establishing and sustaining democratic self-government. Where does this leave us today?

    Based on more than 20 years of research, teaching and administration centered around civic education, at institutions ranging from community colleges to the Ivy League, I have six recommendations for democratic analysis, education and action to move beyond this hyperpartisan moment.

    1. Advance analysis rather than allegations. I started this essay with two critiques of President Trump advanced by leaders at centers ostensibly associated with conservativism. More recently I demonstrated alignments between current conservative appeals and civic aspirations under two popular Democratic presidents. We should spend far less time and ink debating whether something emerges from Republican or Democratic roots. Our proper roles as academics and as citizens direct us to consider specific policies and practices, to compare them historically and cross-nationally, and to gather evidence of impacts. We now have a landscape that includes more than a dozen new civic schools and centers. We therefore have opportunities to assess their differences, similarities and impact.
    2. Demonstrate that rights derive from shared governance. Work with students to understand the relationship between good government and everyday functions such as freedom to move, freedom to associate, freedom to contract and freedom to trade. These rights manifest through the promise made in the Declaration of Independence. “Governments are instituted,” it reads, “to effect … Safety and Happiness.” Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration is an indispensable aid in any such effort.
    3. Encourage historic political-economic comparisons of rights. Diving deep into history from all corners of the world clarifies various kinds of colonizing forces and diverse approaches to good government, from imperial China to the Persian Empire and American expansion. Last year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson, received the award for research demonstrating that societies with well-established rule of law and individual rights are more likely to become economically prosperous. Consider this and other, disciplinarily diverse explorations of the structural conditions for human flourishing. Push past dichotomizing narratives that sort history into tidy buckets. Rights as we know them—expanded and protected through state institutions—are tools of liberation with an extended, colonial and global heritage. Mounk’s podcast is an excellent resource for contemporary, comparative interrogation of the structures and cultural commitments that advance rights.
    4. Wrestle with power and violence. Despite national and global history riven with conflict and conquest, many progressives came to imagine that democracy is a given, that having rights in conditions of comparative peace is the natural state. Yet those rights only manifest through the disciplined commitments of state officials doing their jobs. In a recent article in Democracy, William A. Galston, a Brookings Institution senior fellow, professor at the University of Maryland and former Clinton administration official, suggests democracy is on the defensive because citizens too frequently “regard the movement toward tolerance at home and internationalism abroad as irreversible.” Nonsense, argues Galston. History shows us societies descend into evil, governments revoke liberties and armies invade. Democratic liberties are co-created political commitments. They have always depended upon judicious, democratic stewardship of policing power at home and military power abroad. Questioning state structures of enforcement should be part of university-level civic education, but so too should respecting them and understanding the reasons for their persistence. Here and throughout, civic education must balance respect for the past, its traditions and its empirical lessons, with possibilities for the future.
    5. Embrace and interrogate foundational democratic values. Meditate on the intentionally aspirational commitment to American democracy, embodied in the assertion that all people are created equal. Nurture the virtue of respect for others implied by inherent equality. Foster—in yourself and in your students—an embrace of human dignity so strong that you seek bridging opportunities across the American experiment, working to find the best in others, seeking connections with individuals who seem most unlike you. Even if they offer no reciprocity, never forget any person’s basic humanity. Before analyzing or convincing, listen and find ways to listen well beyond your normal circles. My colleague at the University of Pennsylvania Lia Howard is modeling such efforts with systematic approaches to democratic listening across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
    6. Most of all, if principled, rigorous, honest analysis beyond partisan dichotomizing appeals to you, know that you are not alone. Danielle Allen (Harvard University), Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) and Eboo Patel (Interfaith America) lead among numerous scholars and organizers refreshing democratic ideals for our era. They demonstrate that democracy does not manifest without attention to our shared heritage, our collective institutions and our willingness to respect one another. They hold a pragmatic space between civic education as unquestioning nation-building on one extreme and as unmoored social justice activism on another. Readers curious about their approaches can begin with Allen presenting “How to Be a Confident Pluralist” at Brigham Young University, Appiah making a cosmopolitan case for human dignity and humility in The New York Times Magazine, and Patel in conversation with American University president Jonathan Alger in AU’s “Perspectives on the Civic Life” series.

    This essay, it must be noted, was almost entirely completed before the political assassination of Charlie Kirk. It now becomes even clearer that we must identify ways to analyze beyond partisan pieties while embracing human dignity. Some leaders are reminding us of our ideals. Utah governor Spencer Cox’s nine minutes on ending political violence deserves a listen. Ezra Klein opened his podcast with a reflection on the meaning of the assassination, followed by his characteristic modeling of principled disagreement with a political opponent (in this case, Ben Shapiro). It is the second feature of that Klein podcast—extended periods of exploration, disagreement and brief periods of consensus regarding critical democratic questions—that we must see more of across campuses and communities. One of the worst possible, and unfortunately plausible, outcomes of this movement for civic schools and centers could be the continuing balkanization of campuses into self-sorted identity-based communities, with very little cross-pollination. That would be bad for learning and for our country.

    Whatever the political disposition of civic centers or other programs across campus, we need more and better cross-campus commitment to democratic knowledge, values and beliefs if we wish to continue and strengthen the American democratic tradition.

    Eric Hartman is a senior fellow and director of the executive doctorate in higher education management at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education.

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  • Why Did College Board End Best Admissions Product? (opinion)

    Why Did College Board End Best Admissions Product? (opinion)

    Earlier this month, College Board announced its decision to kill Landscape, a race-neutral tool that allowed admissions readers to better understand a student’s context for opportunity. After an awkward 2019 rollout as the “Adversity Score,” Landscape gradually gained traction in many selective admissions offices. Among other items, the dashboard provided information on the applicant’s high school, including the economic makeup of their high school class, participation trends for Advanced Placement courses and the school’s percentile SAT scores, as well as information about the local community.

    Landscape was one of the more extensively studied interventions in the world of college admissions, reflecting how providing more information about an applicant’s circumstances can boost the likelihood of a low-income student being admitted. Admissions officers lack high-quality, detailed information on the high school environment for an estimated 25 percent of applicants, a trend that disproportionately disadvantages low-income students. Landscape helped fill that critical gap.

    While not every admissions office used it, Landscape was fairly popular within pockets of the admissions community, as it provided a more standardized, consistent way for admissions readers to understand an applicant’s environment. So why did College Board decide to ax it? In its statement on the decision, College Board noted that “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.” The statement seems to be referring to the Trump administration’s nonbinding guidance that institutions should not use geographic targeting as a proxy for race in admissions.

    If College Board was worried that somehow people were using the tool as a proxy for race (and they weren’t), well, it wasn’t a very good one. In the most comprehensive study of Landscape being used on the ground, researchers found that it didn’t do anything to increase racial/ethnic diversity in admissions. Things are different when it comes to economic diversity. Use of Landscape is linked with a boost in the likelihood of admission for low-income students. As such, it was a helpful tool given the continued underrepresentation of low-income students at selective institutions.

    Still, no study to date found that Landscape had any effect on racial/ethnic diversity. The findings are unsurprising. After all, Landscape was, to quote College Board, “intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” If you look at the laundry list of items included in Landscape, absent are items like the racial/ethnic demographics of the high school, neighborhood or community.

    While race and class are correlated, they certainly aren’t interchangeable. Admissions officers weren’t using Landscape as a proxy for race; they were using it to compare a student’s SAT score or AP course load to those of their high school classmates. Ivy League institutions that have gone back to requiring SAT/ACT scores have stressed the importance of evaluating test scores in the student’s high school context. Eliminating Landscape makes it harder to do so.

    An important consideration: Even if using Landscape were linked with increased racial/ethnic diversity, its usage would not violate the law. The Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case Coalition for TJ v. Fairfax County School Board. In declining to hear the case, the court has likely issued a tacit blessing on race-neutral methods to advance diversity in admissions. The decision leaves the Fourth Circuit opinion, which affirmed the race-neutral admissions policy used to boost diversity at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, intact.

    The court also recognized the validity of race-neutral methods to pursue diversity in the 1989 case J.A. Croson v. City of Richmond. In a concurring opinion filed in Students for Fair Admission (SFFA) v. Harvard, Justice Brett Kavanaugh quoted Justice Antonin Scalia’s words from Croson: “And governments and universities still ‘can, of course, act to undo the effects of past discrimination in many permissible ways that do not involve classification by race.’”

    College Board’s decision to ditch Landscape sends an incredibly problematic message: that tools to pursue diversity, even economic diversity, aren’t worth defending due to the fear of litigation. If a giant like College Board won’t stand behind its own perfectly legal effort to support diversity, what kind of message does that send? Regardless, colleges and universities need to remember their commitments to diversity, both racial and economic. Yes, post-SFFA, race-conscious admissions has been considerably restricted. Still, despite the bluster of the Trump administration, most tools commonly used to expand access remain legal.

    The decision to kill Landscape is incredibly disappointing, both pragmatically and symbolically. It’s a loss for efforts to broaden economic diversity at elite institutions, yet another casualty in the Trump administration’s assault on diversity. Even if the College Board has decided to abandon Landscape, institutions must not forget their obligations to make higher education more accessible to low-income students of all races and ethnicities.

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  • A Better Way to Prepare for Job Interviews (opinion)

    A Better Way to Prepare for Job Interviews (opinion)

    One of the things that makes interviews stressful is their unpredictability, which is unfortunately also what makes them so hard to prepare for. In particular, it’s impossible to predict exactly what questions you will be asked. So, how do you get ready?

    Scripting out answers for every possible question is a popular strategy but a losing battle. There are too many (maybe infinite?) possible questions and simply not enough time. In the end, you’ll spend all your time writing and you still won’t have answers to most of the questions you might face. And while it might make you feel briefly more confident, that confidence is unlikely to survive the stress and distress of the actual interview. You’ll be rigid rather than flexible, robotic rather than responsive.

    This article outlines an interview-preparation strategy that is both easier and more effective than frantic answer scripting, one that will leave you able to answer just about any interview question smoothly.

    Step 1: Themes

    While you can’t know what questions you will get, you can pretty easily predict many of the topics your interviewers will be curious about. You can be pretty sure that an interviewer will be interested in talking about collaboration, for example, even if you can’t say for sure whether they’ll ask a standard question like “Tell us about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal” or something weirder like “What role do you usually play on a team?”

    Your first step is to figure out the themes that their questions are most likely to touch on. Luckily, I can offer you a starter pack. Here are five topics that are likely to show up in an interview for just about any job, so it pays to prepare for them no matter what:

    1. Communication
    2. Collaboration (including conflict!)
    3. Time and project management
    4. Problem-solving and creativity
    5. Failures and setbacks

    But you also need to identify themes that are specific to the job or field you are interviewing for. For a research and development scientist position, for example, an interviewer might also be interested in innovation and scientific thinking. For a project or product manager position, they’ll probably want to know about stakeholder management. And so on.

    To identify these specific themes, check the job ad. They may have already identified themes for you by categorizing the responsibilities or qualifications, or you can just look for patterns. What topics/ideas/words come up most often in the ad that aren’t already represented in the starter pack? What kinds of skills or experience are they expecting? If you get stuck, try throwing the ad into a word cloud generator and see what it spits out.

    Ideally, try to end this step with at least three new themes, in addition to the starter pack.

    Step 2: Stories

    The strongest interview answers are anchored by a specific story from your experience, which provides a tangible demonstration about how you think and what you can do. But it’s incredibly difficult to come up with a good, relevant example in the heat of an interview, let alone to tell it effectively in a short amount of time. For that, you need some preparation and some practice.

    So for each of your themes, identify two to three relevant stories. Stories can be big (a whole project from beginning to end), or they can be small (a single interaction with a student). They can be hugely consequential (a decision you made that changed the course of your career), or they can be minor but meaningful (a small disagreement you handled well). What is most important is that the stories demonstrate your skills, experiences and attitudes clearly and compellingly.

    The point is to have a lot of material to work with, so aim for at least 10 stories total, and preferably more. The same story can apply to multiple themes, but try not to let double-dipping limit the number of stories you end up with.

    Then, for each of your stories, write an outline that gives just enough context to understand the situation, describes your actions and thinking, and says what happened at the end. Use the STAR method, if it’s useful for keeping your stories tight and focused. Shaping your stories and deciding what to say (and not say) will help your audience see your skills in action with minimal distractions. This is one of the most important parts of your prep, so take your time with it.

    Step 3: Approaches

    As important as stories are in interviewing, you usually can’t just respond to a question with a story without any framing or explanation. So you’ll want to develop language to describe some of your usual strategies, orientations or approaches to situations that fall into each of the themes. That language will help you easily link each question to one of your stories.

    So for each theme, do a little brainstorming to identify your core messaging: “What do I usually do when faced with a situation related to [THEME]?” Then write a few bullet points. (You can also reverse engineer this from the stories: Read the stories linked to a particular theme, then look for patterns in your thinking or behavior.)

    These bullet points give you what you need to form connective tissue between the specific question they ask and the story you want to tell. So if they ask, “Tell me about a time when you worked with a team to achieve a goal,” you can respond with a story and close out by describing how that illustrates a particular approach. Or if they ask, “What role do you usually play on a team?” you can start by describing how you think about collaboration and your role in it and then tell a story that illustrates that approach.

    Though we are focusing on thematic questions here, make sure to also prepare bullet points for some of the most common general interview questions, like “Why do you want this job?” and “Tell us about yourself.”

    Step 4: Bring It All Together

    You really, really, really need to practice out loud before your interview. Over the years, I’ve found that many of the graduate students and postdocs I work with spend a lot of time thinking about how they might answer questions and not nearly enough time actually trying to answer them. And so they miss the opportunity to develop the kind of fluency and flexibility that helps one navigate the unpredictable environment of an interview.

    Here’s how to use the prep you did in Steps 1-3 to practice:

    • First, practice telling each of your 10-plus stories out loud, at least three times each. The goal here is to develop fluency in your storytelling, so you can keep things focused and flowing without needing to think about it.
    • Second, for each of the bullet points you created in Step 3, practice explaining it (out loud!) a few times, ideally in a couple of different ways.
    • Third, practice bringing it all together by answering some actual interview questions. Find a long list of interview questions (like this one), then pick questions at random to answer. The randomness is important, because the goal is to practice making smooth and effective connections between questions, stories and approaches. You need to figure out what to do when you run into a question that is challenging, unexpected or just confusing.
    • And once you’ve done that, do it all again.

    In the end, you’ve created a set of building blocks that you can arrange and rearrange as needed in the moment. And it’s a set you can keep adding to with more stories and more themes, keep practicing with new questions, and keep adapting for your next interview.

    Derek Attig is assistant dean for career and professional development in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Derek 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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  • How Witnessing Violence Impacts Brain Development (opinion)

    How Witnessing Violence Impacts Brain Development (opinion)

    On Sept. 10, a public lecture at Utah Valley University became the site of a nightmare when the political commentator Charlie Kirk was killed before thousands of students. Whatever one thinks of Kirk’s politics, the trauma endured by those young witnesses will last far longer than the news cycle. For adolescents, such moments do not fade when the cameras leave. They etch themselves into the brain—literally. Witnessing violence, even indirectly, negatively impacts brain development.

    At the University of Southern California’s Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE), our colleagues recently studied how violence exposure shapes young people. Again and again, the evidence is stark: When adolescents witness or hear about violence in their communities, their developing brains bear the burden. The anterior cingulate cortex—a region critical for processing stress and pain, emotional regulation, motivation, learning, and social connection—has a greater decrease in gray-matter volume in adolescents exposed to more community violence. This pattern of gray-matter volume decrease has been seen in ground troops deployed to war and in people affected by post-traumatic stress disorder. It has been linked to anxiety, depression and difficulty sustaining attention.

    Yet neuroscience also points to a path forward. Our newest research, published this year in the Journal of Research on Adolescence, offers a striking counterpoint: Adolescents are not passive victims of their environments. They have within them the capacity to buffer these harms, within themselves and within society. That capacity is what we call transcendent thinking.

    Transcendent thinking is the ability to move beyond the immediate details of an event and consider the complexities that characterize a diverse society, to explore perspectives that differ or conflict with one’s own and to contemplate the bigger picture: What does this mean for me, for my community, for justice and fairness? When teenagers reflect in these ways, they are not escaping reality but engaging it more deeply. They are searching for meaning, considering multiple perspectives and placing their experience in a larger human story. This, in turn, helps them imagine how things might be different, and how they might contribute to the change.

    In our study of 55 urban adolescents, those who more frequently engaged in transcendent reflection about social issues showed a greater increase in gray-matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex two years later—the very brain region seen to be most vulnerable to violence exposure. In other words, transcendent thinking didn’t erase the negative effects, but it appeared to give young people’s brains some scaffolding to adapt and heal.

    This has profound implications for how we respond to political and community violence. The instinct, understandably, is to shield young people from harsh realities. But shielding won’t work. Adolescents are already encountering violence—whether on the street, online or in lecture halls. What they need are the tools to make sense of it, to weave their experiences into narratives of purpose and agency rather than despair. And for this, they need curiosity about the experiences of others and safe opportunities to think across difference.

    Fortunately, transcendent thinking is not rarefied or inaccessible. It is something every young person can do and likely already does spontaneously. The challenge is to nurture it deliberately and thoughtfully. Schools and colleges can make space for students to grapple with complex social issues and to connect classroom learning with ethical and civic questions. Families and communities can invite adolescents into intergenerational storytelling, where young people see how others have wrestled with hardship and injustice. Education that emphasizes civic reasoning and dialogue can strengthen not only academic outcomes but also neurological resilience and long-term well-being.

    This is both a scientific and a civic imperative. Neuroscience is showing us that meaning making changes the brain. We need support for educators to find ways to translate that science into daily practices that help young people transform tragedy into purpose. Our vision is to illuminate the capacities that empower adolescents to question their and others’ beliefs, to engage across difference, to imagine futures and work to create the world they want to live in.

    The tragedy at Utah Valley University underscores how high the stakes have become. America’s young people are coming of age amid rising polarization and public acts of violence. We cannot protect them or shield them from it, but we can equip them to counter its developmental impacts.

    Transcendent thinking is not a cure-all. But it is a proven developmental asset that can buffer the effects of witnessing community violence on the brain. It is also a civic skill we urgently need: the ability to see beyond the present conflicts and tragedies to the larger questions of justice, community and meaning.

    If we want to safeguard both adolescent development and democratic life, we must equip schools, colleges, families and communities with the tools to cultivate transcendent thinking.

    Mary Helen Immordino-Yang is the Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology and a professor of education, psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education.

    Kori Street is executive director of USC CANDLE.

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  • Strategies for Personalized Learning in AI Age (opinion)

    Strategies for Personalized Learning in AI Age (opinion)

    How do we teach effectively—and humanly—in this age of AI?

    New advances in artificial intelligence break news at such a rapid pace that many of us have difficulties keeping up. Dinuka Gunaratne gave a detailed summary of many different AI tools in his “Carpe Careers” article published in July; yet more tools will likely appear in the next months and years in an exponential explosion. How do we, as educators (new and established Ph.D.s) design curriculum and classes with these new AI tools being released every few weeks? How do we design effective assignments that teach critical analysis and logical thought while knowing that our students, too, have access to these tools?

    Many existing AI tools can be used to assist with course design. However, I will provide some insight on methods of pedagogy that emphasize personalized learning regardless of what new technology becomes available.

    Some questions educators are now thinking about include:

    1. How do I design an assignment so the student cannot just prompt an AI tool to complete it?
    2. How do I design the course so that the student can choose whether or not to use AI tools—and how do I assess these two groups of students?

    Below, I outline some wise teaching practices with an eye toward helping students develop core skills including critical thinking, problem-solving, teamwork, creativity and—the most essential skill of all—curiosity.

    Making the Most Out of Class Time

    An effective course utilizes a combination of teaching strategies. I outline three here.

    1. Make sure that your class is generative so that when you give an assignment, it reaches as far back as day one. A generative learning model is one in which each week is built upon the previous one, and in which a student is assessed on the knowledge they have cumulatively accrued.
    1. Hold interactive in-person activities in each class, building upon the previous assignments and content.
    2. Flip the classroom so that class time is used for discussion and not a monologue presentation from you. If you can assign videos or reading assignments for students to view or read prior to class, then you can use class time to discuss the content or reinforce the learning with group activities.

    Here is an example of combining these tools in the buildup to a presentation from one of my classes.

    • Week 1: Each student writes and brings a one-page summary of their research so that peers can provide feedback. I provide feedback training in class before the peer readings take place.
    • Week 2: Using the peer feedback of the summary, each student creates one slide summarizing their research for a three-minute thesis (3MT) and brings the slide to class to receive peer feedback.
    • Week 3: Students practice presentation skills through an activity called “slide karaoke,” in which a student has one minute to present a simple slide they have never seen before. They are then given feedback by peers and the instructor on general presentation skills. I provide peer feedback training before the presentations.
    • Week 4: Students implement the general feedback from slide karaoke and give practice 3MT presentations to receive specific peer and mentor feedback on the content. These mentors are usually students from the year before who revisit the class.
    • Week 5: Students give the final 3MT in front of judges and peers for evaluation.
    • Week 6: Students write a summary of what was learned from the entire generative experience.

    This sequence of assignments is personalized so that the final report can only be about the student’s individual experience. While students might want to use AI tools to edit or organize their ideas, ChatGPT or other AI tools cannot possibly know what happened in the classroom—only the student can write about it.

    For larger classes in which a presentation from each student may not be possible, here is another example.

    • Week 1: A video or reading assigned to students to view/read before class discusses the basics of DNA and inheritance. An in-class assignment involves a group discussion on Mendelian inheritance problem sets.
    • Week 2: Before class, students read an article on how DNA is packaged; the in-class discussion focuses on the molecules involved in chromatin structure.
    • The next classes all have either prereads or videos, which students discuss in class, and the content builds up to a more complex genetic mechanism, such as elucidating the gene for a disease. The final report could be “summarize how one could find a gene responsible for a certain disease using the discussion points we had in class.” In this scenario as well, the student is taking the personalized class experience and incorporating the ideas into the final report, something that cannot be wholly outsourced to any AI tool.

    If you decide to embrace AI tools in the classroom, you can still teach critical thinking and creativity by asking the students to use AI to write a report on a topic discussed in class—and then in part two of the assignment, ask them to assess the AI-generated report, cite the proper references and correct any mistakes, content or grammar-wise.

    I sometimes show an example of this in class to demonstrate to students that AI makes mistakes, rather than giving it as an assignment. But it is something you might want to try making an optional method for an assignment. Students can declare whether they used AI or not on their submission. As an instructor, you will need to design two rubrics for these different groups. Group one will have a rubric based on content, grammar, references, logical thought and organization, and clarity. Group two (those who use AI) will have a rubric consisting of the same components in addition to an evaluation of how well the student found the AI mistakes.

    Applying for Teaching Positions

    If you are applying for a teaching position, you should address AI in your teaching dossier and how you may or may not incorporate it—but at the very least, discuss its effects on higher education. Many articles and books on this topic exist, including Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning, by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson (Johns Hopkins Press, 2024); Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Joseph E. Aoun (MIT Press, 2017); and Generative AI in Higher Education, by Cecilia Ka Yuk Chan and Tom Colloton (Routledge, 2024).

    Yet even as we consider how to integrate AI in our teaching, we must not forget the human experience at work in all that we do. We can emphasize things like 1) encouraging students to meet with us in person or even for a walk as opposed to a virtual meeting and 2) assessing what emotions students bring to the meeting or class and how that may affect the dynamics. We as educators should harness the human side of teaching, including the classroom experience and the in-class group work, so that the “final” assessments build directly out of these personalized learnings.

    For those venturing into a career that involves teaching or mentoring, develop teaching strategies and tools that center the human experience and include them in your teaching dossier. Your application will shine.

    Nana Lee is the director of professional development and mentorship, special adviser to the dean of medicine for graduate education, and associate professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto. She is also a member and regional director of the Graduate Career Consortium—an organization providing an international voice for graduate-level career and professional development leaders.

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  • How Charlie Kirk Changed Gen Z’s Politics – The 74

    How Charlie Kirk Changed Gen Z’s Politics – The 74


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    This analysis originally appeared at The Up and Up, a newsletter focused on youth culture and politics. 

    There’s been a massive effort to understand why Gen Z shifted right in the 2024 election. Part of that movement was thanks to Charlie Kirk and his work to engage young people — on and offline.

    Whether it was his college tours or the campus debate videos he brought to the forefront of social media, he changed the way young people think about, consume and engage in political discourse.

    Over the past few years, as I’ve conducted Gen Z listening sessions across the country, I’ve watched as freedom of speech has become a priority issue for young people, particularly on the right. The emphasis on that issue alone helped President Donald Trump make inroads with young voters in 2024, with Kirk as its biggest cheerleader. Just a few years ago, being a conservative was not welcomed on many liberal college campuses. That has changed.

    Even on campuses he never visited, Kirk, via his massive social media profile and the resonance of his videos online, was at the center of bringing MAGA to the mainstream. Scroll TikTok or Instagram with a right-leaning college student for five minutes, and you’re likely to see one of those debate-style videos pop into their feed. Since the news broke of the attack on his life last week, I’ve heard from many young leaders — both liberal and conservative — who are distraught and shook up. The reality is that Kirk changed the game for Gen Z political involvement. Even for those who disagreed with his politics, his focus on young voters inevitably shifted how young people were considered and included in the conversation.

    Like many of you, I’ve followed Kirk for years. Whether you aligned with his policy viewpoints or not, his influence on the conversation is undeniable. And, for young people, he was the face of the next generation for leadership in the conservative party.

    Kirk’s assassination was the latest in a string of political violence, including the political assassination in Minnesota that took the life of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, and left state Sen. John Hoffman wounded. One of the most common fears I hear from young people across the country and the political spectrum is that political division has gone too far. Last week’s shooting also coincided with a tragic school shooting in Colorado. The grave irony of all these forces coinciding — gun violence, political violence and campus violence — cannot be ignored.

    In all my conversations with young people, one thing is clear: they are scared.

    Gen Z perspectives 

    After Wednesday’s tragedy, I reached out to students and young people I’ve met through listening sessions with The Up and Up, as well as leaders of youth organizations that veer right of center. Others reached out via social media to comment. Here’s some of what they shared.

    California college student Lucy Cox: “He was the leader of the Republican Party and the conservative movement right now especially for young people. He’s probably more famous than Trump for college students. He had divisive politics, but he never went about it in a divisive way. He’s been a part of my college experience for as long as I’ve been here. He felt like somebody I knew. His personality was so pervasive. It feels very odd that I’m never going to watch a new Charlie Kirk video again.”

    Jesse Wilson, a 30-year-old in Missouri: “From the first time I saw him, it was on the ‘Whatever’ podcast, I’ve watched that for a long long long time. Just immediately, the way he carried himself and respected the people he was talking to regardless of who they were, their walk of life, how they treated him. Immediately I just thought, ‘Man, there’s just something different about him.’ He was willing to engage. It was the care, he didn’t want to just shut somebody down. He was like, ‘These are my points, and this is what I’m about,’ and it seemed like there was a willingness to engage and meet people where they’re at. I found it really heartwarming. And we need it. That’s what’s going to make a difference.”

    Ebo Entsuah, a 31-year-old from Florida: “Charlie had a reach most political influencers couldn’t even imagine. I didn’t agree with him on a number of things, but there’s no mistaking that he held the ear of an entire generation. When someone like that is taken from the world, the impact multiplies.”

    Danielle Butcher Franz, CEO of The American Conservation Coalition: “Charlie changed my life. The first time I ever went to D.C. was because of him. He invited me to join TPUSA at CPAC so I bought a flight and skipped class. When we finally met in person he grinned and said, ‘Are you Republican Sass?’ (My Twitter at the time) and gave me a big thumbs-up. I owe so much of my career to him. Most of my closest friends came into my life through him or at his events. Because of Charlie, I met my husband. We worked with him back when TPUSA was still run out of a garage. Charlie’s early support helped ACC grow when no one else took us seriously. He welcomed me with open arms to speak at one of his conferences to 300+ young people when ACC was barely weeks old. I keep looking around me and thinking about how none of it would be here if I hadn’t met Charlie.”

    A 26-year-old woman who asked to remain anonymous: “I would be naive to not admit that my career trajectory and path would not have been possible without Charlie Kirk. He forged a path in making a career with steadfast opinions, engaging with a generation that had never been so open-minded and free, slanting their politics the exact opposite of his own. He made politics accessible. He made conservatism accessible. But damn, he made CIVICS accessible. He dared us to engage. To take the bait. To react. He was controversial because he was good at what he was doing. Good at articulating his beliefs with such conviction to dare the other side to express. He died engaging with the other side. In good or bad faith is one’s own to decide, but he was engaging. In a time where the polarization is never more clear. So I will continue to dare to engage with those I agree and those I disagree with. But it’s heartbreaking. It feels like we’ve lost any common belonging. There has not been an event in modern political history that has impacted me this much. Maybe it hits too close to home.”

    Disillusioned by a divided America 

    Over the summer, I wrote about Gen Z’s sinking American pride. Of all generations, according to Gallup data, Gen Z’s American pride is the lowest, at just 41%. At the time, I wrote that this is not just about the constant chaos which has become so normalized for our generation. It’s more than that. It’s a complete disillusionment with U.S. politics for a generation that has grown up amid hyperpolarization and a scathing political climate. What happened last week adds a whole layer.

    Beyond the shooting, there is the way in which this unfolded online. There’s a legitimate conversation to be had about people’s reactions to Kirk’s death and an unwillingness to condemn violence.

    As a 19-year-old college student told me: “This reveals a big problem that I see with a lot of members in Gen Z — that they tend to see things in black and white and fail to realize that several things can be true at once.”

    There’s also the need for a discussion about the speed at which the incredibly graphic video of violence circulated — and the fact that it is now seared into the minds of the many, many young people who watched it.

    We live in a country where gun violence is pervasive. When we zoom out and look toward the future, there are inevitable consequences of this carnage.

    Since The Up and Up started holding listening sessions in fall 2022, young people have shared that civil discourse and political violence are two of their primary concerns. One of the most telling trends are the responses to two of our most frequently asked questions: “What is your biggest fear for the country, and what is your biggest hope for the country?” 

    Consistently, the fear has something to do with violence and division, while the hope is unity.

    I think we all could learn from the shared statement issued by the Young Democrats and Young Republicans of Connecticut before Trump announced Kirk’s death, in which they came together to “reject all forms of political violence” in a way we rarely, if ever, see elected officials do.


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  • From ‘Bring It On’ to ‘This Policy Is Crazy,’ NYC Parents React to Cellphone Ban – The 74

    From ‘Bring It On’ to ‘This Policy Is Crazy,’ NYC Parents React to Cellphone Ban – The 74

    One year after I reported on New York City parents’ reactions to a proposed ban on cellphones in the classroom, students and teachers have returned to schools with that ban in place. 

    When I asked families on my 4,000-plus-member NYC School Secrets mailing list how they felt about the new restriction, I received answers ranging from enthusiasm to concern. 

    “Phones and smartwatches in classrooms and school hallways are more than just a distraction — they’re a barrier to learning, focus and social development,” according to Manhattan’s Arwynn H.J. 

    “Bring on the ban,” cheered Bronx parent and teacher Jackie Marashlian. “My high school students were ready to air-scroll me toward the ceiling with their fingers, so bored with whatever it was I was trying to impart to them. One day we had a WiFi glitch and I saw my students’ beautiful eyes for the very first time. Bring kids back to face-to-face interaction and socializing during lunch breaks.” 

    “As a middle school teacher in the Bronx and parent of an eighth grader, I think the cellphone ban is fantastic,” agreed Debra. “While my son is ‘devastated’ he can’t have his phone, it scares me that he’s said he doesn’t know what to do at lunch/recess without a phone. Kids have become so reliant on technology, even when they are with their peers, that often they are not really WITH their peers; they are all just staring at their phones. I hope the cellphone ban leads more students to be both physically and mentally present.”

    For mom Elaine Daly, the phone ban affects her more than her special-needs daughter. “My child is 11 and knows she is not to use the phone in school. My parental controls blocks, locks and limits access. But I need her phone to be on so I can also track her, since the NYCSchools bus app always says: Driver offline.”

    Jen C., who reported the ban has been going well with her child in elementary school, sees a bigger issue for her high school-age son. “He has homework online and likes to get started during his free periods. However, he’s not allowed to use his laptop, and there are not enough school issued laptops. I feel that teachers should give off-line work, or the school needs to give access to laptops.”

    Parents of older students were the ones most likely to be against the blanket edict.

    “You can’t have the same policy for kids 6 years old and for 17 years old,” mom Pilar Ruiz Cobo raged. “This policy is crazy for seniors. Yesterday, my daughter had her first college adviser class, and only five kids could work because the rest didn’t remember their passwords to Naviance and the Common App. The verification code was sent only to their phones. Children who don’t study, don’t study with and without phones, now the children who actually work have to work double at home.”

    A Queens mom pinpointed another problem. “Many high school students leave the premises for lunch, and my son’s school is one of those. He said they’re not allowed to take their phones. Children need to use phones outside of school for various reasons; to use phone pay, to contact their parents for lunch money or any updates, etc…”

    The policy varies from school to school. At some, students are allowed to request their phones back when temporarily leaving the premises. However, the larger the school, the less likely it is to have enough staff to handle such exchanges.

    “An interesting aspect of this policy is that although it was presented as a smartphone ban, it’s actually much more expansive, including tablets and laptops,” pointed out dad Adam C. “This presents a challenge for high school students who rely on laptops for receiving, completing and submitting assignments through Google Classroom.”

    “They say parents have to provide their own laptop pouch (there are none similar to Yonder), and they can’t store laptops in backpacks,” confirmed Queens mom Y.N. “My son has afterschool sports activities and likes to do his homework on his laptop in between. I think he’ll have to take it with him and hope they don’t confiscate.”

    “While I’m not opposed to keeping students off platforms like Snapchat during school hours,” Adam continued, “They should be able to connect a laptop to a school-managed Wi-Fi network for school-related purposes, and the current policy doesn’t provide the schools with much leeway around this.”

    But Y.N. doesn’t believe that’s accurate. “I already voiced my concern to the Student Leadership Team (SLT). At the Panel for Education Policy, they said these rules are fluid. Because the regulations came after the SLTs were done for the year, the chancellor said they should be able to change them. She said a plan had to be made before Day One, but it doesn’t mean that adjustments can’t be made at the school level. ‘Tinkering’ was the word they kept using.”

    If that’s the case, perhaps NYC can pull back from its traditional one-size-fits-all approach and allow individual schools to “tinker” and set limitations based on the needs and feedback of their community, adjusting policy based on grade level, academic requirements and a multitude of other factors.


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  • Thoughts on Education and Freedom as Fall Begins (opinion)

    Thoughts on Education and Freedom as Fall Begins (opinion)

    As our fall semester begins, college students are filled with excitement and nervous anticipation. By my lights, they are getting ready to practice freedom in the service of learning. Back in the 18th century, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that enlightenment was freedom from self-imposed immaturity, describing how the process of education was the practice of freedom. When people learn—embarking on the journey of thinking for themselves in the company of others—they are experimenting with choice, autonomy, relationship and discipline.

    I (usually) find it thrilling to watch students experiment in these ways, and I occasionally get to join in. They are relinquishing—not completely, and certainly not all at once—their childish ways and trying on what it means to be an adult. They begin to experience that freedom from immaturity and figure out, provisionally, the kinds of lives they want to live. This normally includes, but is not limited to, the kind of work they are prepared to do. Facing this very practical issue is part of growing up, and colleges provide various opportunities for doing just that.

    Still, many in America have doubts about whether today’s college student is, in fact, learning to be a free adult. Some have been persuaded that college campuses no longer value the open exchange of ideas but instead demand allegiance only to ideas deemed progressive. Others see colleges as failing to practice what they preach. Children of alumni or wealthy donors have a much better chance of getting admitted to highly selective colleges than ordinary Americans; the paths to colleges believed to offer the best educations are paved with gold.

    The charge of unfair admissions—like the criticism of political groupthink or mindless grinding away to get grades and internships—attacks the integrity of learning as a path to freely thinking for oneself. If colleges are unfair or corrupt in choosing their students, then the value of the education offered is undermined. If one only learns to imitate the views of one’s professors in order to win their favor, then one is wallowing in immaturity and not practicing freedom.

    Unquestionably, there has been a loss of trust in higher education, and— while less dramatic, perhaps, than the loss of trust in the judiciary, the media or Congress—it undermines the ability of colleges to teach their students. No matter how much teachers emphasize critical thinking, learning requires trust. It requires that we open ourselves to ideas and people that might have an impact on how we live. This can, of course, sometimes be disturbing, even offensive, but the deepest learning often involves reconsidering our assumptions and deeply held beliefs.

    I see this regularly in the class I teach, Virtue and Vice. I see undergraduates willing to stress test their moral intuitions against thinkers as varied as Aristotle and Machiavelli, Friedrich Nietzsche and Danielle Allen. I see students considering how they want to live by thinking with some of the central texts of our traditions. Each week they practice one of the traditional virtues and discuss this with their fellow students. They read, think, practice, discuss. Reconsider and repeat.

    Critics prone to exaggeration have claimed that this kind of traditional humanistic work is no longer possible because today’s colleges have been captured ideologically by the woke left. Of course, there have been pernicious examples of close-mindedness from progressive purists, but the current attempt at ideological capture by the Trump administration is far more dangerous, as well as dishonest. Since President Trump’s inauguration, scores of colleges are being investigated for deliberately ignoring the harassment and intimidation of their Jewish students. These investigations, I have argued, are just vehicles for the White House to put pressure on higher education.

    As a Jewish teacher and university president, it pains me to see the fight against antisemitism used as a cudgel with which to attack centers of teaching and research. I’ve been very aware of antisemitism since I was a little boy, when a fellow fourth grader told me the only thing wrong with Hitler was that “he didn’t finish the job.” I reported this to my dad, and he told me to punch the kid at the next opportunity, which I did. I got in trouble at school, but my father was not displeased. I’ve never expected antisemitism to go away, and so its recent resurgence is concerning but not surprising.

    I am genuinely startled, though, by the ways Christian nationalists in the American government use Jew hatred as a vehicle to advance their authoritarian agenda. That’s what we are witnessing today: the exploitation of anti-antisemitism by a White House determined to extort money and expressions of loyalty from higher education. Sensing opportunity, some universities see a marketing advantage in portraying themselves as “good for the Jews,” offering protest-free environments (all the while singing the praises of free speech).

    As academic leaders, of course we must support students of faith generally, and we have a particular obligation to acknowledge religious minorities who have traditionally been targets of abuse. This, of course, includes but is not limited to Jews. Not a few of my students are interested in the topic “virtue and vice” because of their religious beliefs, and I find they are at least as capable of thinking critically about their faith as secular students are when asked to reconsider their own values. They join in the process of reading, thinking, practicing, discussing. Reconsider and repeat. As we practice a virtue each week, all my students learn how moral ideas might play a role in their daily lives. How much of a role, of course, is up to them.

    When I write it’s “up to them,” I imagine their choices as part of the process of leaving behind self-imposed immaturity. Sometimes, unfortunately, parents contribute to a student remaining a child, especially when they try to run interference for cherished offspring whenever an obstacle arises. But most of the time I see undergraduates practicing freedom in a safe enough environment—not too safe that they aren’t pushed to reconsider their choices, but accommodating enough that they can explore possibilities without feeling in danger. 

    This environment is threatened by the enormous pressure the federal government is putting on higher education to “align its priorities” with those of the president. I am worried about the normalization of this authoritarian effort to reshape the ecosystem of higher education. Too many opportunists and collaborators have been responding by noisily preaching neutrality or just keeping their heads down.

    Some faculty, student and alumni groups, however, have begun to stand up and make their voices heard. Whether refusing to apologize for diversity efforts or simply standing up for the freedom of scientific inquiry, there is growing resistance to the administration’s attempt to control civil society in general and higher education in particular.

    The groups defending their campuses from governmental intrusion are not just shielding the status quo. They are resisting attempts to undermine education as the practice of freedom, safeguarding the various ways that learning can allow students and teachers to open their minds and their hearts to new ideas and ways of living.

    We don’t want the government thinking for us, telling us what the president’s priorities are so that we can imitate them. We want to learn to think for ourselves in the company of others, leaving behind a dependence on authority. Authoritarians would see us impose immaturity upon ourselves. As the new school year begins, we in higher education must redouble our efforts to model and defend the enlightenment ideals of education and freedom—while we still can.

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  • On AI, We Reap What We Sow (opinion)

    On AI, We Reap What We Sow (opinion)

    I teach a first-year seminar. We call the course Education and the Good Life. The goal of the class is to engage students in a 15-week conversation. We talk about how they can make the most of their courses and our campus, with an eye toward the question of how the college experience can create an approach toward the world that lasts their whole life. In that spirit, last fall, I gave students an example of how I spend my time.

    In class, I shared a set of drafts of a poem that appeared in my most recent collection. One by one, I projected versions of the poem onto a screen. I drew attention to the red ink slashing through unwanted words. I pointed out how I added, struck, added, struck and then re-added a comma. I boasted about my careful use of my favorite punctuation mark—the delightfully overlong em dash. In the end, I shared all 32 drafts of the poem, from conception to published work. When I stopped, a student in the front row quipped, “That doesn’t seem efficient.” In response, I quoted Annie Dillard—“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”—and I talked about the concept of “craft.” I suggested that a committed craftsperson produces work, but that in important ways, and for the reason Dillard suggests, the work also produces them. In the end, the time we spend on our projects makes us who we are.

    I asked the class to think about the time they give to writing assignments. I encouraged them to think about the minutes and the hours that they carve out of their schedules to read and then to write. I told them, “These are investments, not just in the creation of something to turn in on a deadline, but rather, investments in your humanity.” I explained, “When you give yourself time to use your faculties, you end up changing the dimensions of your mind.” I said, “You’re changing yourself.” Then I mused about how a college graduate is a certain kind of person, and how the process of earning a degree is largely a process of becoming.

    My students are smart. They understand social conventions. They know how to act, so they humored me. They nodded their heads, even though I detected facial expressions formed with a noticeable twist of “maybe that is how it worked in your generation.” Without saying the words, they made a point. History matters.

    In addition to my work on campus, I serve as a member of the Higher Learning Commission’s peer-review corps. Once or twice a year for the past 22 years, I have studied and visited colleges for the sake of ensuring the quality of their operations. When I joined the corps, in the early 2000s, the HLC held a leadership role in the nationwide assessment movement. The assessment of what students submit as their work, and by proxy what they know and what they can do, had become the benchmark by which we judge our institutions and accredit them. Because the question of whom students become during an education is harder to answer, and because the methods to answer such questions are out of necessity qualitative, we left those concerns aside while we moved, as a country, toward documenting the easily measurable, but narrowly defined, cognitive outcomes of the college experience.

    In the early 2000s, the heightened focus on the assessment of learning outcomes dovetailed with what were then advances in technology. Web-based platforms, still described as “learning management systems,” made it possible to assess students’ abilities at a distance, anytime, anywhere and under nearly any circumstance. The new, single-minded focus on the cognitive outcomes of higher education burgeoned alongside efforts to legitimize the new online institutions that had removed time in place as a component of schooling. In effect, our message was that we take stock of our success by measuring the end product of education, as opposed to the process of becoming educated. Students are smart. They quietly noted our priorities.

    Enter AI. Today we live in an era in which students can feed a prompt into an automated prose generator and, in seconds, have a viable draft of a writing assignment. What are they supposed to think? We’ve spent three decades acting like outcomes assessments are the only things we value. As for questions about how or where or with whom people engage in the process of becoming educated, our general approach has been, “These are not things that we like to know about.”

    Consider our focus on outcomes in another sphere of human development: athletics. Assume for a moment that you are a cyclist. I am confident that technocrats will soon create a bot capable of riding a bicycle. On a day when life presents you with too much to do, and you can’t find time to ride, would it seem reasonable to send a bot out in your stead? I hope that sounds absurd. During most of the time that we give to athletics, the outcome is not the point. In cycling, on most days, the point is not that a bicycle was ridden. The point is that you rode a bicycle.

    The craft of writing and the art of performing music share a set of similarities. Both demand engagement, practice and the exercise of creativity. The difference is that writing practices, outside of occasional public readings, tend to unfold in solitude, whereas a musical performance is, by nature, a social event. Imagine yourself as a student of the violin. At the end of the semester, during your final recital, would it seem reasonable to bring in a Bluetooth speaker, cue up a music streaming service to a song that you’ve been practicing and hit the play button? Of course not. The point is not that a song was played in the recital hall. The point is that you played the song.

    In the era of AI, student disengagement looms like a fog on our campuses, from libraries to studios and laboratories. Our best data on undergraduate engagement suggests that members of Generation Z are reading less. When pressed with assignments that require deep thought, time on task and earnestness, students tend to see technology as a means to maximize efficiency. Should we blame them? We spent years building systems and assessments designed to sidestep questions about the nature of the process students move through on the way to earning degrees.

    Through our actions, preferences and even accreditation, we built a set of values that suggest the finish line is what matters. We tend to see the route that we take to arrive there as irrelevant. Every campus I have ever visited staffs an office dedicated to the measurement of cognitive learning outcomes. I have yet to find a similar office aimed at understanding the quality, character or broad-ranging impact of the processes that students engage in during the course of an education.

    I would say it’s past time that we started to give the process of becoming educated our attention. But in at least some quarters, we have long-standing and holistic studies of the college experience. In 1991, Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini wrote the first of what became a three-volume set, published at roughly 10-year intervals: How College Affects Students. Alongside a chapter on verbal, quantitative and subject matter competence, each edition of the book contains sections on psycho-social change, attitudes and values, and moral development. We should see the AI era as providing us with a reason, and an opportunity, to expand our interests to include an analysis of the broadly formative processes involved in education, as opposed to focusing solely on narrow sets of outcomes. Fortunately, if we find the will to turn our curiosity toward questions about the quality of the time that we ask students to invest in their education, or the kinds of people that college graduates become, there is a well-developed body of literature waiting to guide our efforts.

    My first-year seminar includes an end-of-the-semester Saturday retreat. A local museum hosts the event. We take a tour in the morning, then students give presentations throughout the afternoon. The day represents more than just another class meeting. It’s a celebration. We make it a potluck, and the table we use features an impressive array of dishes: snacks, desserts, salads and crocks full of chili and soup.

    This past year, at the end of the day, I stood at the table with three students as we were preparing to leave. I happened to point out that half of the contributions brought to the potluck were handmade. The others were store-bought. The handmade dishes were nearly gone, while the efficiently prepared, mass-produced cookies and salads still sat in their plastic containers.

    One of the students said, “Hmm.” Then she added, “It’s not just ingredients on a table.” She went on, “How is something made? Who makes it? What kind of time do they spend?” She said, “That stuff matters.”

    I smiled and told her I agreed.

    Chad Hanson serves as a member of the faculty in sociology and religion at Casper College in Wyoming.

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  • The Trust in “Trustee” (opinion)

    The Trust in “Trustee” (opinion)

    The federal government and some state governments are now wanting to dictate to American colleges and universities what can and can’t be said on campus, what must and must not be taught in the curriculum, which students to admit and which to expel, which faculty to hire and which to fire, and what subjects to research and how.

    Part of this effort at ideological capture of American higher education has been to try to redefine the role of trustees at our institutions, particularly the public ones, as mere partisan operatives who should impose the will of the party in power on the institutions they govern. Trustees are framed as accountable to “the public.” They should be. The problem is that in this context, what is meant by “the public” is only that portion of it that agrees with government officials in charge at the moment, not the broader citizenry.

    Why is this a bad idea? Shouldn’t elected officeholders have some influence on the public campuses that their governments help fund? (Student tuition and donors help fund them, too, of course.) What about influence on private institutions whose students use public financial aid to pay tuition, and so much of whose research is government-funded? These are wholly reasonable expectations. However, when influence turns into direct intervention, when it manifests as heavy-handed government management, we have a problem. Why’s that?

    The genius of American higher education since colonial times has been the absence of a Ministry of Education that controls the operation of colleges and universities. This approach is very much in the American vein. The notion is that those who occupy elected office should not be able to manipulate independent, credible sources of information that might influence whether they get re-elected. (Ironically, many of the people who are pushing direct government control of higher education are at the same time taking apart the federal Department of Education because they say it exercises too much control over educational institutions.)

    The logical conclusion to today’s growing governmental pressure on higher education would be to dismiss all boards of trustees and establish a centralized ministry to govern the sector. Why resist the siren song of my favorite party telling those pointy-headed academics how to run their business without the intermediary layer of these governing boards? I’ll provide here just a few of the reasons.

    First, because Americans don’t like censorship, especially when the government does it. They hate the idea of any government telling them or their kids how to think or what to say. They don’t like political parties determining for them what “the truth” is. Trustees are the border runners between the party in power and government entities on the one hand, and the university on the other. At their best, they act as a conduit to bring public opinion—and sometimes public criticism—into the university, while at the same time buffering it from interference that gets in the way of its always messy search for truth, and its service to the commonwealth that derives from that mission.

    Second, boards in particular can and need to step up to defend America’s researchers in fields such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics as they follow their expertise to discoveries that benefit the health, economic well-being and national security of our citizens. Boards can assist in warding off politically motivated regulations and budget cuts that senselessly damage this vital progress pipeline. An Associated Press/NORC at the University of Chicago poll from May showed that 75 percent of Democrats and 57 percent of Republicans favor maintaining federal funding for scientific and medical research. Governing boards, populated by highly regarded, independent citizens with impressive personal and professional networks, are uniquely positioned to reflect the bipartisan will of the people, regardless of their personal partisan leanings.

    Third, if elected politicians, not trustees and staff, decide who gets hired and fired at colleges and universities, employees will be chosen and dismissed based more on personal and party loyalty than expertise and merit. So much for meritocracy.

    Fourth, boards can and should model for students, staff and the public at large how public-spirited volunteers civilly debate policy issues, without fear or favor, across whatever divisions exist among board members. Has there ever been a time when that would be a greater service by trustees to American democracy?

    Colleges and universities are hardly perfect. For one thing, they have not adequately reflected the diversity of the country—intellectual, economic or ethnic. This and other flaws trustees can identify and help fix. As informed, “loving critics,” they know more about their institution than anybody else who does not work there. Working with their president, they can push their institution to teach the conflicts we live today authentically and objectively, not preach the prevalent party line on campus or in the state house.

    In the current overheated political rhetoric, trustees, especially of public institutions, are presented with a false choice: Do you serve your institution or the citizens of your state? The question is based on the absurd assumption that you cannot serve both. Trustees have a responsibility to serve citizens by protecting the legacy of their institution built by previous generations, improving its quality and reach for today’s population, and ensuring its sustainability for generations to come. They should not be counting down to the next election; they should be taking the long view. That’s what we should be able to trust them to do.

    Kevin P. Reilly is president emeritus and Regent Professor for the University of Wisconsin system and a member of PEN America’s Champions of Higher Education group of former college and university presidents.

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