Tag: opinion

  • Faculty/Administrative Divides Weaken Higher Ed (opinion)

    Faculty/Administrative Divides Weaken Higher Ed (opinion)

    As U.S. higher education enters one of the most perilous times in its history, an internal threat makes it even more vulnerable—the ever-widening chasm between administrators and faculty. In the last three decades, budget pressures at larger universities have led administrators to shift faculty ranks toward contingent appointments with near-poverty wages, no benefits and little opportunity for advancement.

    At research universities, the remaining tenure-track faculty positions have become hypercompetitive, with faculty having to publish far more than they did in the 1980s to obtain tenure and promotion. Pressure on these faculty to obtain large grants continues to mount in a funding environment that is now uncertain and even chaotic. At other universities, faculty ranks in general have shrunk, leading to increased workloads and larger class sizes, alongside shifts to more online offerings to meet student demand.

    On the administrative side, the tenure of senior leaders is also shrinking, leading to increased leadership turnover. New leaders come in with change agendas to fix some prior unaddressed issue or manage significant budget deficits or other operational inefficiencies. In this environment, faculty disillusionment is high, as is disengagement. It is all too easy for administrators to treat faculty as expendable resources, forgetting that there is a human component to leadership and fostering distrust between these two critical groups of campus leaders.

    But as external threats come to campuses, a divided campus will not be well prepared to fend off attacks aimed at weakening institutional autonomy. Administrators on many campuses find themselves unable to speak openly about their objections to current federal or state policies due to institutional neutrality stances or concerns about political blowback; at the same time, we have seen faculty organizations and unions step out in front to defend academic freedom and institutional autonomy. In this context, how can these two groups come together to restore trust, re-engage all stakeholders and build productive working relationships?

    We write this from the perspectives of a longtime faculty leader and faculty champion who has published on the problems of deprofessionalizing the faculty and a longtime administrator who started as a faculty member and moved up the ranks to a chancellor position by working with faculty to solve campus challenges. We have worked together over the years from our respective vantage points, publishing tools and resources that are geared toward fostering clarity, communication and collaboration in the face of a rapidly changing environment. We know that the faculty/administrative divides will not serve the academy in this current crisis. But we have seen examples of ways that both groups can come together.

    Here we offer some suggestions for leaders—faculty and administrative—from our experiences working with hundreds of campuses. We call for administrators to take the first step in reaching out, repairing and rebuilding where trust and relationships have been broken. But we also call on faculty to ask what they can do in response or how they might “lead up.” If one group extends an olive branch, and if there is to be hope for a different future, the other must accept it. Both parties must also hold one another accountable as relationships are renewed, trust is rebuilt and bridges across the chasm are constructed.

    1. Empower and support faculty leadership. Studies have shown that administrators can help support faculty in having a voice and assuming an active leadership role. Mentoring faculty on how the institution operates, sending faculty to leadership development opportunities, rewarding faculty who step into significant leadership or shared governance roles, providing summer stipends to work on projects, and offering course releases for active faculty leadership can all empower faculty to play a greater leadership role on campus.
    2. Strengthen shared governance structures. Over the last three decades, shared governance has been hollowed out on many campuses. Rebuilding it will require examining processes, policies and structures that enable faculty to contribute meaningfully to campus decision and policymaking. A strong shared governance system is a way to ensure that external groups are less able to divide and conquer, to commandeer the curriculum, the student experience and other key areas of campus work. And ensuring that faculty have avenues to exert their leadership with governing boards can help ensure that board members hear from and understand faculty perspectives and concerns.
    3. Clearly delineate administrative and faculty roles and responsibilities with respect to decision-making, authority and accountability. Strengthening shared governance means including faculty in more than advisory capacities when budgets, organizational structures or operations that affect them are slated for major changes. Put more decisions back in faculty hands, explain situations and ask for input, and include faculty in more important and strategic decisions on campus. Viewpoints may be at odds, and boards and administrators do have important fiduciary responsibilities, but these do not preclude engaging stakeholders in the decision-making process.
    1. Establish and grow your own leadership programs aimed at faculty. One of the best ways to ensure that faculty can play a leadership role on campus and off is to offer an annual leadership program for faculty. Costs can be relatively low for grow-your-own programs that rely on more senior and experienced faculty to serve as facilitators and trainers. Empowering senior faculty to train newer faculty on the campus operations and broader higher education landscape can lead to more proactive succession planning for key campus committees and leadership roles.
    2. Consider using a shared leadership approach to clearly involve multiple people and perspectives in decision-making. Beyond leadership development, consider using more formal structures associated with collaborative or shared leadership. This may help campuses create more inclusive and transparent processes for decision-making, especially when a variety of constituents are involved in or impacted by the changes.
    3. Have regular sessions for faculty and administrators to interact outside shared governance. Occasional lemonade or iced tea gatherings, Zoom social hours, annual community forums and the like can ensure that faculty and administrators get to know each other as people, not just positions. It may also be helpful to have periodic focused workshops or retreats for faculty and administrators on key change issues. These events can be led by external expert facilitators who can help create space for difficult dialogue.
    4. Acknowledge the wrongs and correct the course. When trust is broken, administrators should listen to concerns and be prepared to make adjustments and change course to address those concerns, and faculty should take the opportunity to collaboratively engage. That doesn’t necessarily mean going backward, but going forward in ways that involve a two-way dialogue to address concerns. For example, administrators need to be open about the need to strengthen faculty job security, pay and autonomy, while faculty need to recognize the competing pressures administrators are facing. Ensuring a strong faculty is a key component of a robust system of higher education, which is what is needed to ward off external threats. Somewhere in between lies the solution.

    While these may seem like long-term strategies in the midst of a crisis, this crisis is going to last years, so investing in and empowering the faculty will pay off. Faculty have critical voices that can productively shape the change agenda, if given the opportunity to use them.

    Adrianna Kezar is the Dean’s Professor of Leadership, Wilbur-Kieffer Professor of Higher Education and director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California.

    Susan Elrod is the former chancellor and professor emeritus of Indiana University South Bend. She studies higher education systemic change and is actively engaged in helping campus leaders build capacity to create more strategic, scalable and sustainable change.

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  • 12 Steps for Responding to a Tenure Denial (opinion)

    12 Steps for Responding to a Tenure Denial (opinion)

    I have been denied tenure at my former R-1 institution. Twice. And after being assured yearly, in writing, that I was making appropriate or exceptional progress toward a positive decision based on departmental criteria and standards. Most of you can imagine, and some of you know, how that felt. The inconsistency seemed misleading and a breakdown of the promotion and tenure process, similar to articles in Inside Higher Ed by Colleen Flaherty and in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael W. Kraus, Megan Zahneis and Chelsea Long.

    I fought the first decision through formal institutional channels and won, and my institution did a re-review of my dossier from the ground up. In April of this year, I was told that I’d been denied a second time, and I was dismissed at the end of May. However, I could contest the decision processes as a nonemployee. I’m fighting the denial decision (again), and the hearings will begin in the fall.

    My area of specialization is program evaluation, with a focus on graduate education. That means I have seen the good, bad and ugly as higher education institutions discuss criteria and standards about student and faculty performance, curriculum and policy; I have a professional and personal interest in all university processes being fair and defensible for all their constituents. My experience is that the processes are not always fair, and having gone through this process before, I have some advice on the steps you should take to fight the decision. While my advice is necessarily grounded in the context of my experience and my former institution’s procedures, it can be adapted to your own.

    1. Get angry. Talk to your family, friends, colleagues you trust and your dream team of collaborators. Rage about the process and the decision and the decision-makers and the injustice, but get the hot anger out of your system and absolutely do not hurt yourself or anyone else. Let your rage cool so you can use it as energy to fight. You are not powerless, because all university processes and assumptions can be challenged. But know that the odds are heavily stacked against you.
    2. Recognize the fundamental assumption of institutional competence. There is an assumption that the university correctly followed its policies and procedures and therefore reached a defensible decision. Without very specific performance criteria for promotion, it likely won’t matter how many dozens of works you’ve published, how many grants you’ve supported, how many students you’ve helped complete their degrees, how much your skills are in demand from other units or how you’ve (over-) satisfied the criteria against which you were supposed to be judged. The standing assumption is that the university did its due diligence.
    3. Get help. Your institution has a vested interest in making sure its processes are defensible and that you can fight against decisions corrupted by inappropriate processes. Ask for a grievance hearing by the university’s regulatory body or a hearing panel (in my former institution, this group is housed in the University Senate). They should be able to connect you with a tenured faculty advocate to help you develop your process-based argument. To prevent further corruption in the process and avoid possibilities of retaliation, this advocate must be housed in a different college from the one in which the decisions were made.

    You may have the option of using an external lawyer or union representative to argue your case, but if you bring a lawyer, the respondent will bring one, too. Do what you think is best, but know that the standard of evidence in a grievance hearing is different from that in a court of law, and will likely be closer to “likelihood of procedural issues or prejudicial influence” than to “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    1. Be clear about the relief you’re requesting. Even if a grievance panel rules in your favor, they may be limited in the relief they can offer. It’s unlikely that they can simply overturn the provost’s decision, but they may be able to recommend a re-review of your dossier. It may be helpful to think about the worst-case scenario—if your dossier is sent for re-review by the same people who voted against you the first time—and ask for reasonable, specific protections to make the re-review fair and balanced.

    Be sure to request that the judgment includes a monitoring and compliance aspect. If the panel rules in your favor, the institution needs to ensure that the recommendations are followed. Don’t let assumptions of institutional competence prevent this from happening, and do not take on that responsibility yourself.

    1. Use available templates. The grievance panel likely has a template to help you structure your argument. Use it faithfully, and don’t deviate from the specific information it requests. It will likely start by asking you to form the basis of your argument by quoting verbatim from your institution’s tenure code. Copy and paste this to make it easy for the panel to find information when they hear your case. The panel needs to stay within its institutional authority, and you must convince them immediately that your experience and concerns about the process are within their purview.
    2. Read and re-read your institution’s foundational documents. There are at least three essential documents you must use to support your argument that the process was corrupted: the department or college’s faculty handbook, the regents’ or president’s statement on tenure criteria and ways of contesting decisions, and statements on employee conduct inclusive of reporting requirements for policy violations. You must show how procedural violations significantly contributed to an unjust decision. Examples of such violations could include:
    • Discrimination against personal beliefs and expression, or factors protected by federal/state law (e.g., equal opportunity violations, Title IX violations)
    • Decision-makers’ dismissal of available information about your performance
    • Demonstrable prejudicial mistakes of fact
    • Other factors that cause substantial prejudice
    • Other violations of university policy

    After you have articulated the criteria you are using to contest the decision, you must substantiate each claim with evidence that the violation negatively influenced the final decision. The burden of proof will be on you.

    1. Organize your evidence. Whatever evidence you present must be organized, accessible and easy for the hearing panel to review. It may be helpful—and therapeutic—to start by making a comprehensive timeline of the pertinent events that led to the decision. Include the dates and written summaries of every annual review, the steps you took to address any human resources issues, the outcomes of those steps, leadership transitions, as well as sociopolitical events that directly influenced the department and institution. Your goal is to share with the panel the entirety of your experience at the institution and make the argument that you did the best you could to address any real or perceived performance issues.

    Include the official dossier that was passed through the system as evidence, and use the highlight function of the PDF software to focus on the parts that are most important for your case and that best challenge the assumption of institutional competence. Keep a running list of your documented evidence, which you’ll submit as a set of appendices, and refer to your appendices in the complaint document itself, using quotes cut and pasted directly from your primary sources.

    In the document where you set out your complaint, refer to individual appendices by letter, name and page number, so readers can find information and see your evidence in the original context (e.g., “Appendix C: Committee response to factually inaccurate information introduced in faculty discussion, p. 22–24”). Copying and pasting evidence from primary sources will make it easier to reconcile page numbers in the complaint document later. This process is also helpful if you need to argue that the content of the dossier was misrepresented by decision-makers or that one or more particularly vocal individuals are waging a vendetta against you (e.g., “Appendix E: Unsolicited letter from Professor [X] that engages in conspiracy theories about you, p. 100–125”).

    It is crucial to make the argument that you were treated unfairly and in violation of university policy, and that your treatment was significantly different from that of your colleagues who were under review at the same time or in the immediate past. If, for example, a decision-maker voted against your promotion because of their individual critiques of your work, and those critiques are not consistent with other levels of review or they attack the credibility of the other reviewers, you have an argument for their idiosyncratic interpretation of the promotion criteria. Put that evidence in an appendix and draw attention to it.

    It is also helpful to be able to point to the research of others in your department who used the same scholarly processes but who were not critiqued similarly. This can help you argue differential application of criteria and standards of performance, or that a particular reviewer is applying the standards of research in their discipline to your own, which may be a violation of the tenets of academic freedom (talk to representatives from your institution’s academic freedom committee for more information). This comparison may be essential if you are alleging discrimination or prejudicial treatment that may be based on your personal characteristics.

    1. Do not fear a request for summary judgment. This processual request means that the respondent in your case (usually a high-level decision-maker such as the provost or dean) is using the assumption of institutional competence to ask that the case be dismissed without a formal hearing. The respondent will argue that everything was done correctly, that the decision was justified and that you are simply angry about the decision. The request will likely be formal and the words intimidating, but that may be the point. Read every word so you can respond in writing to each argument, and prepare responses on the assumption that the issues will come up during oral arguments at the official hearing. Sometimes the request for summary judgment will be peppered with prejudicial language that helps reinforce the basis of your complaint. Use their words against them.
    2. Prepare your witnesses. You will want to identify good witnesses who will substantiate your main points, but not people who will repeat their evidence from the same perspective; you do not want to bore the hearing panel. Let your witnesses know who your other witnesses are and you can give them a sense of the questions you will ask them during the hearing. You cannot, however, coach them on how to respond; witnesses must be able to respond to your questions honestly, and their responses must stand up under cross-examination.

    Be sure to list the respondent and decision-makers on your witness list; you don’t want to miss the chance to hold them accountable for the things they’ve written and the decisions they’ve made. Don’t waste time indicting them on their leadership practices. Instead, show how their active and passive behaviors violated policy and prejudiced the review process in violation of the university’s foundational documents.

    1. Make the most of the hearing. You may find that the hearing is a very formal process, that an external lawyer will be present for the institution (not the respondent) to ensure the process unfolds correctly and a court transcriptionist will ensure accurate recording of testimony. The witnesses may be sworn in, and you can count on them being asked questions by the complainant, respondent and the hearing panel. If possible, you should lead the questioning for your witnesses and ask your advocate to lead the questioning of the respondent and their powerful witnesses to minimize the power imbalance.

    The respondent may not have many questions for you, but remember that you have the burden of proof, and they will not want to provide additional opportunities for you to substantiate your claims. If they do open additional areas of critique, be ready to call out the ones that are inconsistent with policy and processes. Expect to be physically and emotionally exhausted at the end of your hearing.

    1. Respond to the decision. When the hearing panel’s decision arrives, expect strong emotions. You may feel vindicated and think that you’ve finally been heard or feel as if you’ve been traumatized again. Even if you win, both are fair responses. If you won on all or some of the issues you raised, you can expect the panel to propose a set of recommendations intended to address those issues, but the process is not yet over.

    The panel may be empowered only to make recommendations to the university president, who has the final say on what happens. The president has the right to overrule the panel, just as they have the right to order compliance with its recommendations. You can write a formal letter to the president about the panel’s recommendations, as can the respondent. If you have concerns about the recommendations, especially if new issues came to light during the hearing, this is your one chance to make those issues known to the ultimate decision-maker.

    Because the grievance hearing may have shown that the process contained problems that have not likely been institutionally addressed, emphasize monitoring and compliance with hope for reconciliation. Don’t expect the president to grant you additional protections beyond what was recommended by the panel, but if the re-review is corrupted, you have documentation showing that you were concerned about making the process fair and transparent and that you did your due diligence.

    1. Go through the promotion and tenure review process again or leave the institution. Going for tenure again means another year of hoping for a positive decision, dreading a negative one and thinking about your next steps. This is a very difficult time, especially if the underlying issues have not been acknowledged or addressed. Do the best you can, and document everything. A counselor will be essential for processing the ongoing experience.

    If your complaint exposed evidence of systematic harassment or prejudicial behavior against you, reach out to the equal opportunity or Title IX offices for support. They have the option of opening formal or informal investigations but may not be likely to do this during a tenure review or re-review because they cannot be seen as influencing the process. They may not be able to act until you have been promoted or have officially lost your job (again), at which point you might wonder why you should reach out. The answer is unsatisfying but simple: You connect with them because you need emotional support and with the hope they can eventually help address the underlying factors that corrupted the process.

    If you didn’t win on the redo, you’ll need to find another job somewhere else. I hope you’ve used this last year to network and apply for opportunities as you balanced the burden of the grievance process on top of your regular commitments of teaching, research and service.

    If you’re looking at going through this process, you have my sympathy, support and encouragement. Going through it has been one of the hardest experiences of my life, but I’m glad I did it, even if I cannot change my former institution; I can only hope that they will not waste my experience by ignoring the issues it exposed. I couldn’t have done it the first time without extraordinary support from people who hate injustice and fear for institutions that do not follow their own rules. As I prepare for the second round, I will continue to look to my former colleagues for support as I try to be strong for myself, my family, my (former) students and others that go through this process.

    Regardless of what the future brings, I did my best to challenge prejudicial and harrowing issues in higher education by opening conversation about them and dragging trauma from the shadows into the light. No matter the ultimate decision, I can walk with my head high.

    John M. LaVelle is a scholar of program evaluation specializing in the academic preparation of program evaluators. He lives in the United States with his family and is cautiously optimistic about the future.

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  • George Mason Must Not Comply With the Government’s Demands (opinion)

    George Mason Must Not Comply With the Government’s Demands (opinion)

    The Department of Education is demanding a personal apology from George Mason president Gregory Washington.

    Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    On Aug. 22, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced that George Mason University, led by President Gregory Washington, violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The agency demanded an extraordinary remedy—President Washington must issue a personal apology, to be posted “prominently on the University website,” retract statements supporting diversity and abandon practices that even hint at equity-focused hiring. The message to George Mason, where I was a professor of public policy for nearly two decades, is clear: Equity is now presented as a civil rights violation.

    Title VI was meant to prevent discrimination, not to penalize institutions for recognizing that diversity matters. With courts allowing the consideration of diversity as one factor among many in holistic decisions, OCR’s stance appears to be a politically motivated shift away from long-standing interpretations—not a clear enforcement of the law. Just last week, a federal judge “struck down two Trump administration actions aimed at eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs at the nation’s schools and universities,” the Associated Press reported.

    Most alarming in OCR’s proposed resolutions is the demand for a personal apology from the university’s first Black president. Washington, who called for eliminating racist legacies on campus, is now being compelled to apologize for doing just that. This isn’t simply an institutional issue—it’s a deeply symbolic act that resembles public shaming of a leader of color for advocating inclusion. It evokes the disturbing history of targeting minority leaders through law and policy.

    This move against Mason is not an isolated incident; it is part of a broader effort to reshape public institutions. Consider the Trump administration’s recent attacks on the Smithsonian Institution. The president criticized the Smithsonian for highlighting slavery’s brutality and diversity in its exhibits, calling the museums “out of control” and “too woke.” He ordered a comprehensive review of Smithsonian content to align it with his vision of “American exceptionalism,” demanding changes to exhibits begin within 120 days.

    Here again, ideology replaces impartial curation. A common thread emerges: Whether in higher education or national museums, diversity and sincere historical reflection are viewed not as civic strengths but as transgressions. Institutional autonomy and academic governance are being subordinated to partisan narratives.

    Should we dismiss the department’s findings as another part of the culture wars? I worry the consequences are much more serious. If OCR’s interpretation of Title VI holds, even referring to diversity as a priority could trigger federal enforcement. Schools are feel compelled to eliminate inclusive programs, silence voices advocating for equity and adhere to a limited historical perspective—all out of fear of losing funding.

    That chilling effect would cripple higher education when it needs vibrancy most. Universities must remain havens of reasoned inquiry, honest history and inclusive excellence. When federal agencies start dictating not only policy but the exact language leaders must use, we enter coercive territory.

    GMU’s faculty, students, alums and board members must unite in opposition to OCR’s unjustified demands. The proposed resolution is not genuine compliance; it’s forced capitulation driven by intimidation. Institutions should not be compelled to apologize for standing up for the principles of true equal opportunity.

    This moment is a clarion call for universities. Yesterday, it was the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, dragged through headline-grabbing investigations. It was New College of Florida, where political appointees dismantled DEI programs and faculty governance. It was the University of Virginia, accused by the Department of Justice of defying federal antidiscrimination laws. Today it is Mason. Tomorrow, it could be UCLA, Michigan, Wisconsin or any other institution that values diversity, equity and academic freedom. No campus—public or private, flagship or regional—should assume it is immune.

    George Mason should reject the department’s findings and oppose this injustice. Capitulation is not compliance; it’s surrender. If Mason yields, it will damage its credibility and encourage more attacks on higher education nationwide. When universities submit to politically motivated demands disguised as enforcement, they legitimize them and invite more. Silence will be perceived as complicity. Resistance is crucial to protecting the fundamental principles of higher education: autonomy, fairness and the freedom to teach and learn without political interference.

    This is not the first time universities have faced pressure to abandon their commitments to equity and truth. In the 1960s, Southern universities used “law and order” to oppose desegregation. In the 1980s and 1990s, Black faculty and administrators pushing for fair representation often faced vilification and political retaliation. Today, the same tactics are being used, only now they are masked in the language of “civil rights enforcement.”

    What is happening at Mason is part of that history. Title VI, a law born of the civil rights movement to expand opportunity, is being distorted into a tool to silence leaders of color and dismantle diversity initiatives. President Washington’s commitment to pursuing equity should be celebrated, not criminalized. Twisting Title VI into an instrument of ideological punishment and racial scapegoating should alarm everyone who values a democracy that depends on honest history, inclusive leadership and academic freedom.

    And let’s be honest: Coercing a university president to issue a scripted public apology isn’t enforcement—it’s extortion. It’s the same tactic organized crime always uses: Demand submission, humiliate and make an example of one victim to scare others. That has no place in a democracy, much less in higher education.

    The struggle now is the same as it was then: whether our universities will stay places of truth, inclusion and independent thought, or whether they will become tools of partisan control. Mason must choose the first. And the rest of us—in Virginia and across the country—must support it.

    James Finkelstein is professor emeritus of Public Policy at George Mason University

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  • Rise of the Incompetents (opinion)

    Rise of the Incompetents (opinion)

    As an English composition instructor, I’m prone to doomscrolling articles (written primarily by other English composition instructors) about the uses, advantages and dangers of large language models in college classrooms. I think my colleagues, focused on concerns about plagiarism, policing and the tenability of our own employment (all pressing issues in their own rights), may be ignoring the greater threat that text-generation technology poses to our democratic institutions, the judgment of our electorate and the competence of our workforce.

    In one of the articles I found myself scrolling, John Villasenor, writing for the Brookings Institution, suggested that LLMs would lead to “the democratization of good writing.” I was surprised to see that description. The ChatGPT-produced assignments I see on a weekly basis are rarely mistakable for “good.”

    More to the point, research suggests that uniform style and content will not produce a level playing field of competent writers but, more likely, a ceiling of barely capable thinkers. In a study published by Nature Human Behaviour, researchers discovered that “reliance on ChatGPT … reduces the diversity of ideas in a pool of ideas,” to the degree that “94 percent of ideas from those who used ChatGPT ‘shared overlapping concepts.’”

    Academics like Vered Shwartz at the University of British Columbia have also raised concerns that if North American models “assume the set of values and norms associated with western or North American culture, their information for and about people from other cultures might be inaccurate and discriminatory.”

    A diversity of perspective, experience, talent and know-how are required to run and maintain a healthy democratic society. That civic diversity cannot be replicated by machines, and it would be severely damaged by voter rolls consisting of former students educated in the art of outsourcing their mental faculties to chat bots.

    AI proponents are quick to point out historical instances of educators running about like headless chickens at the inventions of keyboards, calculators, pen and ink. I would go further: Socrates opposed the act of writing itself, which he believed would “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it.”

    We remember this quote because Plato wrote it down. It is a fallacy to conflate those examples with the full replacement (sometimes called “assistance”) of human thought by LLMs. Pens, keyboards and even Gutenberg’s printing press democratized writing in that they made it simpler for a greater number of human beings to convey themselves. In contrast, “AI” technology does not make writing easier for writers: At best it makes them readers—at worst, copy-pasters. LLMs pull words from data centers filled with the ideas of other writers, whose work is to a large degree not credited or paid for (even children will tell you that’s called theft). The result is akin to regurgitated vomit.

    To create this essay, I applied Microsoft Word’s red squiggly lines to spot my misspellings. I’ve always been a poor speller (ask my middle school teachers), but the words I produce, the mistakes I make, are still my own, and the reason I make them is tied to my human experience as a communicator. Whether I learn from those mistakes or simply press “fix” and doom myself to repeat them is a conscious choice I make every time I write.

    Of course, the choices don’t end there. I also decided how to approach the topic; what references to pull; how to order my paragraphs (both before and after I wrote them); what idioms, metaphors and introductory language to use; where to place hooks and callbacks; what to title the piece; and how to utilize grammar and punctuation to express my sassy indignation. These are vital skills for students to practice, not because they’re required in every profession, but because they emphasize executive function and cognitive reasoning. Writers are responsible for what they write, speakers for what they say, leaders for what they decide and voters for whom they elect. This in and of itself is reason enough to teach actual writing.

    Another common argument of writers who unironically propose supplanting their own perspectives with generative AI summaries is that the traditional method of teaching writing caters to what Villasenor calls an “inherently elitist” system. To their credit, this is true. In his guide Writing With Power (Oxford, 1998), the esteemed rhetoric and composition professor Peter Elbow, who passed away earlier this year, explained,

    Grammar is glamour … the two words just started out as two pronunciations of the same word … If you knew grammar you were special … But now, with respect to grammar, you are only special if you lack it. Writing without errors doesn’t make you anything, but writing with errors …makes you a hick, a boob, a bumpkin.”

    The fact that we have raised the bar for ourselves is a sign of intellectual progress. Yes, gaps continue to exist (I taught ESL for several years), but I wouldn’t be so quick to concede the higher ground of achievement. Besides, while knowing one’s split infinitives and dangling modifiers is not a prerequisite for civic engagement, an innate, perhaps unconscious understanding of collective grammar norms is still required for reading, and this is true for every written language, in all of its forms (including memes and text messages).

    We should be wary of the faux-populist sentiment behind arguments like this. A willful naïveté is required, I think, to suggest that the products of LLM parent companies (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft) foster equitable principles.

    Even more dangerous is the tactic of deriding the abilities and wisdom of specialists and academics who seek rare and valuable knowledge. This has been and remains a frequent trick of authoritarians, which is why educators should be concerned by the visibly cozy relationship many of these tech companies have fostered with the Trump administration.

    Both thematically and practically, this partnership, forged in campaign contributions, public appearances and the elimination of internal dissent (see: Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post), represents a threat to the university system. The Trump White House, intent on canceling research grants, deporting students and revoking accreditation, has very clearly demonstrated its opposition to “the elites” of academia. Ignorant consumers, like ignorant voters, are easier to manipulate, and ignorance thrives when education falters. Trump stated his preference clearly in a Nevada campaign event back in 2016:

    We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated!”

    According to a Pew Research Center analysis, Trump won the non-college-educated population by a 14-point margin (56 to 42 percent) in the 2024 presidential election, double his margin from 2016. The bad-actor alliance between Trump and big tech companies is no coincidence. They do not want you to write because they do not want you to think.

    The falseness of LLM-generated content is a perfect fit for the reality-rejecting ethos of the Trump administration. Back in April, the White House was accused of outsourcing its world-altering tariff calculations to ChatGPT. In May, the Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published a report that experts discovered was filled with what appeared to be AI-generated false citations.

    These people have access to the greatest resources known to mankind. Why are they operating like bumfuzzled freshmen, submitting sloppy work at the 11th hour? Check the roster. The head of the Environmental Protection Agency has no experience working with the environment. The secretary of education is not an educator. The head of the Department of Housing and Urban Development is a former football player. The secretary of homeland security has never served in either an intelligence or defense capacity. RFK Jr. is a lawyer, not a doctor. Donald Trump is a reality TV star and convicted felon with six bankruptcies and numerous failed businesses to his name. If there is a better example of the Peter Principle in action on Planet Earth today, I don’t know it.

    Jason Stanley, an expert on fascism previously at Yale University and now at the University of Toronto (he was spurred by the Trump administration’s actions to leave the country), identified “anti-intellectualism” as a signature feature in fascist movements.

    As he writes, “Fascist politics seeks to undermine public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise and language. Intelligent debate is impossible without an education with access to different perspectives, a respect for expertise when one’s own knowledge gives out, and a rich enough language to precisely describe reality.”

    As Americans, we are in real danger of voluntarily submitting our cognitive faculties to LLMs for the sake of convenience, thereby weakening our ability to express truth and sort it from falsehood, a dilemma we already face with the advent of social media, extremist “news” networks and both foreign- and domestic-born disinformation. It is easier to give up than to resist. It is easier to delegate than to work hard. Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, knew this well. In a 1949 letter to George Orwell, he predicted,

    Within the next generation, I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude.”

    Our mothers gave us sage advice when we were children; they said, “Don’t take candy from strangers.” Like a creep in a white van, LLMs represent nebulous actors with nefarious purposes. In addition to stealing from countless unattributed human writers, companies like Meta and Google have demonstrated a careless—if not outright vampiric—interest in our personal data.

    The availability of this technology is equally pervasive. There’s a van on every street corner and the driver says that I can save 30 minutes of work by outsourcing it to Gemini. Why shouldn’t I? Isn’t this a benefit to me as an employee? Game theory suggests otherwise—if all competitors offload their work in the same manner, none of them get ahead. In a recent working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard found that “AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation.”

    Perhaps a more important question is this: Where do we imagine that 30 minutes goes? The rise of “AI” has yet to instigate a four-day workweek, and it is unlikely to do so. Since the Industrial Revolution—from black lung to Black Friday—American workers have learned that innovations in productivity rarely manifest as increased pay or shorter work hours.

    In the United States, labor conditions have improved only when collective action demanded it from lawmakers. Such was the case with Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. On their own, the steam engine, spinning jenny, desktop computer and mobile phone failed to reduce the need for workers to be productive. Rather, they set new production standards, profiting company shareholders. Line graphs of U.S. worker salaries and CEO earnings versus inflation over time bear this out quite strikingly.

    Big tech corporations are currently installing LLM apps in every corner of our daily lives, degrading the accuracy of search engines, making it harder to reach human customer service representatives and filling the internet with identical templates and “slop.” This may be profitable for wealthy investors, but it is not progress for average Americans. Moreover, as has been reported by Business Insider and Time, among many others, this rapid incursion represents a serious threat to the livelihood of employees across multiple sectors. Micha Kaufman, founder and CEO of Fiverr, a multinational company offering an “AI-enhanced” platform connecting freelancers and businesses, said back in April that “AI is coming for your jobs. Heck, it’s coming for my job too.”

    I imagine Kaufman can afford to lose his job. Can you? In the short term, corporate bosses may favor compliant employees who hastily enter prompts into LLMs, a skill that might take as much as a few hours of guesswork to develop. But leadership requires competence. Leaders make decisions, carry responsibility and know what to do when systems go down. If a 50-foot wave comes careening over your boat, whom do you want at the helm—a captain with years of sailing experience or one who is very good at asking AI what to do?

    Every time I enter a new classroom on the first day of the semester, I look across the desks and wonder which of my pupils will be a part of the next big thing. Which of them will enter government service? Which of them will teach in my place when I’m gone?

    Educators should not relent in pushing their students beyond the bounds of incompetence. Our collective goal should remain as it always has been—to inspire students to struggle and learn from that struggle, thereby forging new, more capable identities. I want my students to make something of themselves. What a disservice I’d do if, instead, I taught them how to delegate their potential to a machine.

    Noah B. Goldsher is a first-year seminar and first-year writing instructor at Quinnipiac University.

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  • How to Be Interim Dean and Make an Impact (opinion)

    How to Be Interim Dean and Make an Impact (opinion)

    A little more than a year ago, I was appointed interim dean of my college. My predecessor had left us abruptly, and as a former school chair and senior associate dean, I was a predictable choice. Here are some recommendations based on this unexpected journey.

    Before You Even Begin

    Ask your provost to add the option of applying for the dean position to your appointment letter, just in case. I did but soon determined I would not be a candidate. I had become too much of an insider over the prior 13 years to be the improvement agent I thought my college needed. In my experience, external hires are better at bringing about critical change because they arrive without a set reputation and entrenched expectations. The fact that several colleagues encouraged me to apply for the position made clear to me that many people wanted things to stay the same. Many of them seemed to say, “We know you, and we know you won’t rock the boat.”

    Seek the Fellowship of Staff

    As an interim dean, more so than a full-term dean, you quickly need to earn the respect and goodwill of the college staff, associate deans, chairs and directors. I received buy-in by acknowledging that the continued success of the college didn’t depend on me as “decider in chief,” but on the hands-on collaboration from everyone. Send clear signals that “it’s the team, not the dean.”

    ‘Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost’

    I participated in a formal orientation for new administrators by the University System of Georgia about legal, organizational and leadership matters. Other than that, I was mostly left to my own devices, especially when it came to prioritizing among the numerous events and meetings to which a dean gets invited. I ended up wandering into events at which I was the only dean, but ironically this earned me much fortuitous appreciation. When requesting a meeting with a newly elected Faculty Senate leader, they told me my kind of outreach was unheard-of. We had a great convo over a double espresso, and I learned loads about faculty concerns and hopes.

    Seek the Fellowship of Other Deans

    Deans operate at the intersection between senior leadership and department chair, and being wedged in the middle makes for good collegial collaboration. My fellow deans communicated swiftly and reliably and shared draft documents, and we often managed to speak with a common voice on issues. I reciprocated their support by creating a fancy name (“Veritable Decanalia”) for our monthly social gatherings at a hotel bar.

    Don’t Be Interim

    Don’t think of yourself as a placeholder who just keeps the trains running. You are, in fact, the dean, and it’s OK to improve upon your predecessor’s strategies. While you should think twice about too many radical changes (for example, to your college’s reporting structure), feel free to add your own signature. In my case, the signature moves had to do with a focus on student success. For example, two months after taking charge, I adjusted existing budget priorities based on recent data and moved 40 percent of new funding to support graduate education. I also convinced the college advisory board members to become a “giving board” and help fund additional need-based dean’s scholarships for undergraduate students.

    Finally, I surprised everyone by organizing a Year of the Liberal Arts at my STEM-focused university. Such activities can amplify your college’s reputation, and more so when nobody expects this level of activity while an interim person is dean. And they signal to prospective dean candidates that your college is a vibrant place they might want to join.

    And: Be Interim

    Does that sound contradictory? Well, the temporary nature of your appointment can increase the success of your successor if you take care of essential housekeeping items before they arrive. Your successor should not, as one of their first actions, be obliged to impose a spending freeze on a department whose chair overspent by several hundred thousand dollars, and they should not have to press a unit into a memorandum of understanding to return to their contractually mandated (but clandestinely lowered) teaching load. It’s easier for you to repair such matters, and the new dean can begin their work without turning into Draco, the enforcer.

    Over all, heed Gandalf’s advice from The Lord of the Rings for your interim appointment: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” If being constantly reminded of the limited nature of the position bothers you, don’t go for this kind of job. My appointment as interim dean was announced at the same time as the timeline and details for the search committee to replace me; the search process ran simultaneously with my daily work, and an eager staff member changed the nameplate outside my office door two weeks before I moved out. So it goes.

    If you enjoy, for a window of six months to one year, improving the conditions within which students, staff and faculty may thrive, jump at the chance. Your rewards include a steep learning curve and a better understanding of your own institution and higher education in general.

    Of course, while you are on this exhilarating journey of servant leadership, start planning early on for the time after your appointment ends. I admit to having a momentary feeling of relief about moving out of a position that included, especially since January 2025, more political and budgetary emergencies than I had bargained for. But I was just as swiftly persuaded to support my new dean by remaining part of the college leadership team, albeit in an appointment that honored what I had recently learned.

    Richard Utz is senior associate dean for strategic initiatives in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech.

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  • Why Revenue Sharing Is a Bad Deal (opinion)

    Why Revenue Sharing Is a Bad Deal (opinion)

    For many decades, the National Collegiate Athletic Association preserved student athletes’ amateur status by prohibiting their ability to profit off their name, image or likeness (NIL). As a former Division I compliance coordinator, I often felt the NCAA’s amateurism policies went too far—denying student athletes the right to earn money like other college students, such as by running their own sports camps.

    But now the courts have turned the NCAA’s concept of amateurism on its head with the approval in June of a $2.8 billion athlete compensation settlement, which will be shared by student athletes who previously missed out on the opportunity to make money from their NIL. This historic deal between Division I athletes, the NCAA and the Division I Power 5 conferences—the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and ACC—has also made revenue sharing with current student athletes a reality.

    Athletes at top football and basketball programs may be celebrating this financial victory, which allows institutions to share up to $20.5 million each year with student athletes—money generated from media, tickets, concessions and donations.

    But many coaches who recruit them—along with professors like me, who teach them—believe that paying college athletes for their athletic ability will hurt college sports. That’s because doing so professionalizes college athletes in a way that hurts other students and sports over all and compromises the institution’s academic mission.

    And while some student athletes stand to benefit from the new system, most won’t. Many universities will use the 75-15-5-5 model, meaning that 75 percent of the revenue would be distributed to football, 15 percent to men’s basketball, 5 percent to women’s basketball and 5 percent to all other sports.

    Paying players will also change the spirit of college sports. Although the concept of amateurism has been a joke in college athletics for a long time—particularly in revenue-generating sports—a pay-for-play system would further move the emphasis away from educational goals and toward commercial ones. As one big-time head football coach described it to me, “As soon as you start paying a player, they become in some ways their [university’s] employees. It’s not amateurism anymore.”

    On many campuses, a separation already exists between student athletes and nonathletes, which some believe is due to student athletes’ perceived privilege. According to one Division I women’s basketball coach I spoke to, implementing revenue sharing will only increase that divide. Student athletes receiving five- or six-figure salaries to play for their institutions will be incentivized to devote more time to their sport, leaving less time to engage in the campus community and further diluting the purpose of college as an incubator for personal and intellectual growth.

    There’s also a possibility, one coach told me, that colleges will shrink staff and “avoid facility upgrades in order to fund revenue share,” putting off improvements to gyms or playing fields, for instance. At some institutions, funding the revenue-sharing plan will undoubtedly lead to cuts in Olympic and nonrevenue sports like swimming and track.

    What’s more, it remains unclear how revenue-sharing plans will impact gender equity, because revenue distribution may not count as financial aid for Title IX purposes. Since 1972, Title IX has ensured equal opportunities for female student athletes that includes proportionate funding for their college athletic programs. If NIL payments from colleges are not subject to Title IX scrutiny, athletic departments will be allowed to direct all revenue generated from media rights, tickets and donations to their football and men’s basketball programs. As one Division I women’s basketball coach put it to me, “We are widening the gap between men and women athletes.”

    To be sure, the college sports system is problematic; as scholars have pointed out, it exploits student athletes for their athletic talent while coaches and athletic leaders reap the benefits. But creating professional athletes within educational institutions is not the answer.

    Instead, I propose that all student athletes participate in collective bargaining before being required to sign employment-type contracts that waive their NIL rights in exchange for a share of the revenue.

    Collective bargaining would ensure that student athletes are guaranteed specific commitments by their institutions to safeguard their academic success, holistic development and well-being. These could include approved time off from their sport to participate in beneficial, high-impact practices like internships and undergraduate research, and academic support to help them excel in a program of their choosing—not one effectively chosen for them to accommodate their athletic schedule.

    The graduation rates of student athletes—particularly Black male football and basketball players at the top Power 5 institutions—are dismal. A 2018 study by Shaun R. Harper found that, across the 65 institutions that then comprised the Power 5 conferences, only 55.2 percent of Black male athletes graduated in six years, a figure that was lower than for all student athletes (69.3 percent), all Black undergraduate men (60.1 percent) and all undergraduates (76.3 percent). Under collective bargaining, student athletes could retain their scholarships, regardless of injury or exhausted eligibility, to help finish their degrees. Such financial support would encourage athletes to stay in college after their athletic careers end.

    They could also negotiate better mental health support consistent with the NCAA’s best practices, including annual mental health screenings and access to culturally inclusive mental health providers trained to work with athletes. Coaches would learn to recognize mental health symptoms, which is crucial; as one former women’s basketball coach told me, she didn’t “have the right language” to help her athletes.

    Presently, the NCAA’s posteligibility injury insurance provides student athletes only two years of health care following injury. Collective bargaining could provide long-term health care and disability insurance for those sustaining injuries during college. This matters because football players risk their lives every day to make money for their institutions—doubling their chances to develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy with each 2.6 years they play and likely significantly increasing their chances of developing Parkinson’s disease relative to other nonfootball athletes.

    As one football coach mentioned to me, it may be too late to put the proverbial genie back in the bottle when it comes to pay for play, but it’s not too late for colleges to prioritize their academic mission in their athletic programs, care for students’ well-being and restore the spirit of college sports.

    Debbie Hogan works and teaches at Boston College. Her research focuses on holistic coaching, student athlete development and sense of belonging of Black student athletes.

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  • NYC Teachers Believe Many Kids Are Gifted & Talented. Why Doesn’t the District? – The 74

    NYC Teachers Believe Many Kids Are Gifted & Talented. Why Doesn’t the District? – The 74


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    In 2020, around 3,500 incoming New York City kindergartners were deemed eligible for a public school gifted-and-talented program. In 2021, that number spiked up to over 10,000.

    What happened to nearly triple the number of identified “gifted” students in NYC in a single year?

    The difference was the screening method. In 2020, as in the dozen years beforehand, 4-year-olds were tested using the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test and the The Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test. Those who scored above the 97th percentile were eligible to apply to citywide “accelerated” programs. Those who scored above the 90th were eligible for districtwide “enriched” classes.

    But in 2021, the process was changed. Now, instead of a test, students in public school pre-K programs qualify based on evaluations by their teachers, and there is no differentiation between those eligible for “accelerated” or “enriched” programs.

    In 2022, the last year for which figures are available, 9,227 students were deemed qualified to enter the gifted-and-talented placement lottery. But for the last decade there have only been about 2,500 spots citywide. Over 6,700 “gifted” students weren’t offered a seat. 

    That’s a shame, because, based on their overwhelming responses to the city’s G&T recommendation questionnaires, NYC teachers believe the vast majority of their young students – a statistically impressive 85% – would thrive doing work beyond what is offered in a regular classroom.

    When evaluating students for a G&T recommendation, teachers are asked, among other things, whether the child:

    • Is curious about new experiences, information, activities, and/or people;
    • Asks questions and communicates about the environment, people, events and/or everyday experiences in and out of the classroom;
    • Explores books alone and/or with other children;
    • Plays with objects and manipulatives via hands-on exploration in and outside of the classroom setting;
    • Engages in pretend/imaginary play;
    • Engages in artistic expression, e.g. music, dance, drawing, painting, cutting, and/or creating
    • Enjoys playing alone (enjoys own company) as well as with other children.

    This video illustrates how such “gifted” characteristics can be applied to … anybody.

    The Pygmalion Effect has demonstrated that when teachers are told their students are “gifted,” they treat them differently — and by the end of the year, those children are performing at a “gifted” level.

    Extrapolating that 85% of incoming kindergartners to the 70,000 or so kids enrolled at every grade level in NYC, that would mean there are 59,500 “gifted” students in each academic year, for a whopping total of 773,500 “gifted” K-12 students in the New York City public school system.

    And extending those calculations to the whole of the United States, then 85% of 74 million — i.e. 62,900,000 — 5- through 18-year-olds are capable of doing work above grade level. With that in mind, academic expectations could be raised across the board, and teachers would implement the new, higher standards filled with confidence that the majority of their students would rise to the occasion. NYC teachers have already said as much on their evaluations.

    What would happen if NYC were to provide a G&T seat to every student whom its own teachers deemed qualified? If it were subsequently confirmed that over 773,500 students in a 930,000-plus student school system are capable of doing “advanced” work, can parents, activists and everyone invested in making education the best it can possibly be for all expect to see such higher-level curriculum extended to all students — in NYC and, eventually, across America?

    As for the minority who weren’t recommended for “advanced” instruction, the combination of Pygmalion Effect and the benefits of mixed-ability classrooms should raise their proficiency, as well.

    Isn’t it worth a try?


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  • Fixing Michigan’s Teacher Shortage Isn’t Just About Getting More Recruits – The 74

    Fixing Michigan’s Teacher Shortage Isn’t Just About Getting More Recruits – The 74

    The number of vacancies is likely an undercount, because this number does not include substitutes or unqualified teachers who may have been hired to fill gaps.

    Local news reports and job boards suggest that at least some Michigan districts are still struggling to fill open positions for the fall of 2025.

    The teacher shortage is a nationwide problem, but it is especially acute in Michigan, where the number of teachers leaving teaching and the overall teacher shortage both exceed the national average. This shortage is particularly severe in urban and rural communities, which have the most underresourced schools, and in specialization areas such as science, mathematics and special education.

    For more than two decades, my work at Michigan State University has centered on designing and leading effective teacher preparation programs. My research focuses on ways to attract people to teaching and keep them in the profession by helping them grow into effective classroom leaders.

    Low pay and lack of support

    Teacher shortages are the result of a combination of factors, especially low salaries, heavy workloads and a lack of ongoing professional support.

    A report released last year, for example, found that Michigan teachers and teachers nationwide make about 20% less compared to those in other careers that also require a college education.

    From my experience working with teachers and district leadership across the state, I know that beginning teachers – especially those in districts which have severe shortages – are often given the most challenging teaching loads. And in some districts, teachers have been forced to work without the benefit of any kind of planning time in their daily schedule.

    The shortage was made much worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led many educators to leave the profession. Yet another culprit is the many teachers who, in Michigan as well as nationally, were hired during the 1960s and early ’70s, when school enrollments saw a massive increase, and who in the past decade have been retiring in large numbers.

    Creating pathways to certification

    One recent strategy to address the teacher shortage in Michigan has been to create nontraditional routes to teacher certification.

    The idea is to prepare educators more quickly and inexpensively. A variety of agencies – from the Michigan Department of Education, state-level grants programs such as the Future Proud Michigan Educator program, as well as private foundations and businesses – have helped these programs along financially.

    Even some school districts, including the Detroit Public Schools Community District, have adopted this strategy in order to certify teachers and fill vacant positions.

    Other similar programs are the product of partnerships between Michigan’s intermediate school districts, community colleges and four-year colleges and universities. One example is Grand Valley State University’s Western Michigan Teacher Collaborative, which targets interested students of college age. Another is MSU’s Community Teacher Initiative, designed to attract students into teaching while they are still in high school.

    Perhaps even more visible are national programs such as Teachers of Tomorrow and Teach for America. Candidates in such programs often work as full-time teachers while completing teacher training coursework with minimal oversight or support.

    ‘Stuffing the pipeline’ is not the solution

    But simply “stuffing the pipeline” with new recruits is not enough to solve the teacher-shortage problem in Michigan.

    The loss of teachers is significantly higher among individuals in nontraditional training programs and for teachers of color. This starts while they are preparing to be certified and continues for several years after certification.

    The primary reasons for the higher attrition rates include a lack of awareness of the complexity of schools and schooling, the lack of effective mentoring during the certification period, and the absence of instructional and other professional guidance in the early years of teaching.

    How to repair the leaky faucet

    So how can teachers be encouraged to stay in the profession?

    Here are a few of the things scholars have learned to improve outcomes in traditional and nontraditional preparation programs:

    Temper expectations. Teaching is a critically important career, but leading individuals to believe that they can repair the damage done by a complex set of socioeconomic issues – including multigenerational poverty and lack of access to healthy and affordable food, housing, drinking water and health care – puts beginning teachers on a short road to early burnout and departure.

    Give student teachers strong mentors. Working in schools helps student teachers deepen their knowledge not only of teaching but also of how schools, families and communities work together. But these experiences are useful only if they are overseen and supported by an experienced and caring educator and supported by the organization’s leadership.

    Recognize the limits of online learning. Online teacher preparation programs are convenient and have their place but don’t provide student teachers with real-world experience and opportunities for guided discussion about what they see, hear and feel when working with students.

    Respect the process of “becoming.” Professional support should not end when a new teacher is officially certified. Teachers, like other professionals such as nurses, doctors and lawyers, need time to develop skills throughout their careers.

    Providing this support sends a powerful message: that teachers are valued members of the community. Knowing that helps them stay in their jobs.

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

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  • Stand Against the Leaky STEM Pipeline (opinion)

    Stand Against the Leaky STEM Pipeline (opinion)

    A couple of years ago, I got into a heated argument with a white male lab mate about whether racial and gender inequities still existed in science. He argued that, having both made it to our Stanford cancer biology lab for graduate school, the two of us, a white man and a Black woman, were functionally equal, and that attempts to distinguish us in future grant and fellowship applications were unfair. When I explained, among many differences, the unequal labor I took on by running a pipeline program for underrepresented aspiring physician-scientists, he replied, “If you gave a fuck about your academic career, you would stop doing that stuff.”

    His attitude is not unique; it represents a backlash against baby steps made toward any form of equity that was also reflected in the 2023 Supreme Court decision to overturn affirmative action. But in recent months, as attacks on diversity equity, and inclusion have unfolded with shocking fervor from the highest office in the country, I have been confronted with terrifying questions: Was my lab mate right? Has DEI work become antithetical to advancement in science?

    Science, as a seemingly objective craft, has historically not cared about the self. Science does not care if you couldn’t spend free time in the lab because you had to work to support your family. Science does not care that the property taxes in the low-income area where you attended high school couldn’t fund a microscope to get you excited about biology. Science does not care that I’ve never once gotten to take a science class taught by a Black woman.

    Such experiences, and many, many more, contribute to the leaky pipeline, a reference to how individuals with marginalized identities become underrepresented in STEM due to retention problems on the path from early science education to tenured professorships. The gaps are chasmic. A couple years ago, Science published the demographics of principal investigators receiving at least three National Institutes of Health grants, so-called super-PIs. Among the nearly 4,000 of these super-PIs, white men unsurprisingly dominated, accounting for 73.4 percent, while there was a grand total of 12 Black women in this category.

    Pipeline programs—initiatives aimed at supporting individuals from underrepresented groups—are meant to patch the leaks. They are rooted in the understanding that minorities are important to science, not just for representation’s sake, but because diverse perspectives counteract a scientific enterprise that, because scientists are human, has historically perpetuated racial, gender and other social inequities. Such programs range from early-stage programs like BioBus, a mobile laboratory in New York City that exposes K–12 students to biology, to higher-level pipeline programs like the one I run at Stanford, which provide targeted early-career support to aspiring scientists from diverse and marginalized backgrounds.

    These programs work. Participants in the McNair Scholars Program, a federally funded pipeline program aimed at increasing Ph.D. attainment among first-generation, low-income and otherwise underrepresented students, are almost six times more likely to enroll in graduate school than their nonparticipant counterparts. These programs are designed to see the student’s full self, and they recognize the extra labor minorities and women disproportionately take on, like mentoring trainees or running their own pipeline programs.

    Sadly, in deference to state laws and the current presidential administration’s attacks, more than 300 public and private universities have dismantled at least some of their DEI efforts. In February, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the nation’s largest private funder of biomedical research, killed its Inclusive Excellence Program, an eight-year-old, $60 million initiative that supported programming at universities to draw more underrepresented groups into STEM. As Science reported at the time, all evidence of the program disappeared from the Howard Hughes webpage. Shortly thereafter, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization dedicated to supporting science, technology and (previously) equality, canceled the second year of its Science Diversity Leadership Awards, even though, as The Guardian reported, the process of selecting new awardees was already underway.

    Researchers and academics have held rallies to stand up for science and have proposed bills for state-funded scientific research institutes, but many have remained silent on DEI. Meanwhile, after a pause to screen for DEI language, the NIH has resumed grant approvals (albeit not at its normal pace), and private organizations like Chan Zuckerberg continue to fund “uncontroversial” science. But science will never be whole without the inclusion of trainees from underrepresented backgrounds, who broaden and improve scientific questions and practice in service of a diverse human population. And without pipeline programs, the gaps will grow.

    That is why I am calling on academics to stand up not just for science but also for DEI. Stand up against the leaky pipeline. Universities and private research institutes must reinstate language on diversity, equity and inclusion, particularly for pipeline programs. Faculty, students and community members should contact the heads of local universities and private organizations like Howard Hughes and Chan Zuckerberg, demanding reinstatement of diversity language and programs. Labs and research groups should adopt diversity statements reaffirming this commitment.

    Given the financial jeopardy federal policy has imposed on pipeline programs, states should also step in. Sixteen state attorneys general recently sued the National Science Foundation for, among other things, reneging on its long-established, congressionally mandated commitment to building a STEM workforce that draws from underrepresented groups; states can take their advocacy further by filling funding gaps. Individuals and private organizations can donate either directly to nonprofits like BioBus or to universities with funds earmarked for pipeline programs.

    Many minority students who have done DEI advocacy worry they can no longer discuss their work when applying for fellowships or faculty positions. To counteract this, universities and research organizations should proactively ask applicants about their leadership and advocacy work, to signal that these are the kinds of employees they want. And scientists who are not from underrepresented groups should leverage their privilege—volunteer for mentorship programs, serve on graduate admissions committees to fight for diversity, advise young scientists from underrepresented backgrounds.

    Show my lab mate that he was wrong. Caring and succeeding are not mutually exclusive.

    Tania Fabo, M.Sc., is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate in genetics at Stanford University, a Rhodes Scholar, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project. She is the program leader for Stanford’s MSTP BOOST pipeline program.

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  • Why Student Motivation Matters (opinion)

    Why Student Motivation Matters (opinion)

    In Jarek Janio’s Inside Higher Ed opinion column, “Beyond ‘Grit’ and ‘Growth Mindsets,’” Janio argues that, to promote better student learning, college instructors should ignore questions about student motivation and focus solely on changing student behavior. He focuses on two ideas from the motivation field—grit and growth mindset—as examples of “traits” that have weak associations with student learning. Instead of focusing on what goes on “inside the student’s head,” he argues we should instead focus on “what’s happening in the environment and change that instead.”

    As educational psychology researchers, we are also interested in how to get students to engage in effective learning behaviors. We fully agree with—and our research supports—the idea that it is important for instructors to structure learning environments to support student learning, such as by offering opportunities for students to revise their work and providing clear, well-defined feedback. However, it is a mistake to ignore what is going on inside students’ heads. In doing so, we miss a very crucial piece of the puzzle.

    Students Are Unique Individuals

    As anyone who has taught a college class knows, students are not robots. There are vast differences between them. Take the example of offering your students an opportunity to revise and resubmit their work, after receiving feedback, for a higher grade. Just because you provide this opportunity does not mean that all your students will take it. Some students will enthusiastically revisit their work, dig into the feedback provided, seek additional feedback and deepen their learning. Others will half-heartedly look over the feedback and make shallow attempts to revise. Still others will not glance at the feedback at all and will not turn in a revision.

    These differences are, in part, due to more stable traits that students may have, such as their conscientiousness, their perfectionism and—yes—their grit. However, these differences may also be a function of other individual differences that are less stable. Take growth mindset, for example. Those of us who study growth mindset tend to think about it as a belief rather than a trait. It is something that can change based on the context.

    Imagine a student who has been told by their statistics instructor that statistics is something that anyone can learn—you just need the right strategies. Their art professor, on the other hand, has told them that you need a special, innate talent to be good at art—you either have it or you don’t. These factors can shape students’ beliefs, and in turn, their behaviors. For example, this student may be much more likely to engage in revising and resubmitting their work in their statistics class (where they have stronger growth-mindset beliefs) than their art class (where they have stronger fixed-mindset beliefs). This pattern is also true for when students feel confident about their abilities or have a desire for learning. Such students seek out help more proactively, and they engage with feedback more constructively.

    Beyond Grit and Growth Mindset

    Although grit and growth mindset are perhaps the most well-known (and have some legitimate weaknesses), researchers in the educational psychology and motivation fields study many other factors that impact student engagement and learning. These include students’ interests, values, goals, needs, emotions, beliefs and perceptions of the instructor and their classroom—all things that are going on inside the student’s head but that are critically important to understanding their behavior.

    Theories of motivation articulate the processes through which students’ beliefs, values, needs and goals shape their engagement, behaviors and choices. Researchers have created and tested effective tools to observe, measure and assess these different factors. Decades of research have given us robust understandings of how these factors are both shaped by and interact with the environment to predict students’ behavior and learning. These aspects of the individual student matter.

    The Student and the Environment Are Both Important

    It is important to focus both on what is going on in students’ heads and what is going on in the environment. Instructors have the power to shape their classroom environment in different ways that can influence student behavior.

    We do not disagree with the strategies Janio proposed instructors should focus on. Instead, we want to emphasize that these strategies are effective because of how they are motivationally supportive. For instance, incorporating a revision process into course assignments is based on mastery goal structures, or the environments instructors can nurture so that students focus on their improvement and growth. Normalizing failure is a growth mindset–teaching practice that helps students see the effort they put into the learning process as being something of value. Providing feedback is an important way to inform a student’s self-confidence and show them how they can be more competent in the future.

    Motivation is the central mechanism through which these strategies can help students persist through learning challenges. By understanding student motivation, these teaching strategies and approaches can be fine-tuned and adapted to differently motivated students to maximize student learning. That is exactly what motivation scientists in education have been investigating for decades. Simply discarding learner motivation is dismantling the science that undergirds motivationally supportive teaching.

    Concluding Thoughts

    A return to behaviorism essentially disregards the last 50 years of psychological research emphasizing the important role students’ cognition, emotion and motivation plays in the classroom. It is critical to understand these psychological processes that have been rigorously tested across many studies. Students are also agentic and complex in their thinking and motivations, so a one-size-fits-all approach rarely works. By harnessing students’ motivation, instructors can better adapt their teaching approaches to match students’ interests and goals in addition to creating motivationally supportive environments that promote persistence and deeper learning. When instructors understand their students’ motivation, it can unlock the type of engagement and behaviors meaningful for learning.

    Katie Muenks is an associate professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. Carlton J. Fong is an associate professor of postsecondary student success at Texas State University.

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