Tag: people

The people you interview will bring your story to life

They can be a useful sources when you’re trying to find out what needs to happen or why something is happening. When your story relates to solutions to development or climate change in a specific country or region, find experts from that country or region, as they have a better understanding of the situation on the ground.

Don’t grab just anyone.

Journalists often find themselves short on time and under tight deadlines. They can easily fall into the trap of grabbing sources who will get back to them quickly, or turning to sources eager for the publicity or the attention that being quoted in a news story will get them.

The result is that journalists often ignore the many people with important stories to tell or information to impart: groundbreaking scientists, people experiencing the damaging effects of climate change every day, individuals and groups working on systemic and just solutions.

The perspectives that we find in the media are therefore limited. The problem here is that the sources can then shape the story and that many perspectives go unheard. Bear that in mind that when you go looking for your sources.

And remember: there is a big difference between a stakeholder and an expert. While an expert can help you identify a problem and explain its causes and effects, a stakeholder gives you the first person accounts and the emotions — anger, fear, pain, frustration — that make a story compelling and urgent. The first person accounts are what will connect with readers or listeners.

If you only have stakeholders, you won’t give your readers a sense of scale or the context needed to understand the problem and figure out how to solve it. But if you only have experts, the story will feel cold and readers won’t connect to it. When you’re telling a story about the climate crisis, for example, you need experts to tell your audience what is happening and what we can do and you need humans on the ground to tell your audience why it matters.

Where to start looking for people

It can be tricky to find stakeholders. People who are victims of some problem might not advertise themselves as such. Here are some ways to find them:

Start with people you already know. They might have relatives, friends and colleagues who you can ask. Those people have relatives, friends and colleagues. Through your own personal network you have access to many, many different people. Let everyone know the story you are working on and the types of people you are looking for.

You will find people in surprising places: Cafes, markets, doctors offices and schools. But they won’t come to you if they don’t know you want to speak to them. And don’t forget the power of social media. Just one person you know who has 2,000 social media friends can reach a lot of people you might not know.

The leaders in your local church, mosque or community center know a lot of people. School organizations are great networking places. So are trade groups, environmental and social advocacy groups and labor unions.

Visit places where people live and gather. There is nothing as good as face to face interactions.

Search out the comments sections of news articles. People often post about their own experiences at the end of articles. Sometimes you might be able to contact them through those comment chats.

The best stories reflect multiple perspectives and include both people’s emotions and opinions and information from experts. The ability to find and talk to these people is the best part of being a journalist.

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October 17, 2025
The battle for people, culture and environment

On the face of it, I can understand why the REF team have pressed pause on their guidance development for 2029.

The sector is in serious financial difficulties, and while most are keen to see a greater focus on People, Culture and Environment (PCE), the challenges experienced by pilot institutions with the proposed assessment mechanism were real.

We cannot get away from this.

But of course, where there’s a vacuum, people will rush to fill it with their own pet peeves and theories, up to and including a full reversion to the rules of REF 2021.

PCE and EDI

One of the biggest fallacies being promoted is this view that PCE is what Iain Mansfield, Director of Research at the Policy Exchange Thinktank, and former Special Adviser, called “a euphemism for Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)”. This conflation of REF PCE with EDI is entirely false. In fact, the PCE pilot included five different enablers of research culture, only one of which related to inclusivity. Of the others (strategy, responsibility, connectivity, and development) two were already themes in REF 2021 Environment Statements (strategy and collaboration) so not exactly a dramatic shift in a whole new direction.

Indeed, the Code of Practice and Environment elements of REF 2021 already placed a significant focus on EDI. Equality Impact Assessments had to be performed at every stage of the submission, EDI training for REF decision-makers was an essential requirement for even submitting to the REF, and both institution- and unit-level environment statements demanded narratives as to how equality and diversity in research careers were promoted across the institution. So anyone seeking a reversion to REF 2021 rules in order to eliminate a focus on EDI is going to be deeply disappointed.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment about this attempt to row back on any deeper focus on research culture in the next REF is that having a thriving research culture is an integral part of any definition of research excellence, whilst being perhaps the second biggest challenge facing the sustainability of the research sector after funding. The Wellcome Trust report, and the Nuffield report that preceded it, taught us that poor incentives, highly competitive & toxic environments, precarious research careers, and unmanageable workloads, are leading to questionable research practices, increased retractions, a loss of talent and reduced trust in science. And all this at a time when we really need more talent and greater trust in science. It wasn’t that long ago that this all led to a Government R&D Culture Strategy making a clear case for better investment in research culture for the benefit of society, but still, in the recent DSIT survey of the UK Research & Development workforce, only 52 per cent of higher education respondents said the culture of their organisation enabled them to perform their best work, compared to 85 per cent in the private sector.

The point of adding greater weight, and a clearer assessment mechanism, to a broader range of culture elements in the next REF was thus to address exactly these issues. As a reminder, the international advisory group for the next REF recommended a split of 33:33:33 for PCE, outputs and impact. Reducing the weight allocated to PCE would not only reduce the attention given to promoting positive research cultures, but actually increase the weighting allocated to the element of REF that is most responsible for driving poor research cultures: publications. We know that the publish-or-perish culture is causing significant problems across the sector. Re-calibrating the assessment to put greater weight on publications would run counter to the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment’s first commitment: to recognise the diversity of contributions to research.

Outputs

I do think the pause in REF is an opportunity to think about how we recognise, incentivise and reward the better research cultures we clearly need. I’ve written before about how many elements of our research culture are essentially hygiene factors and as such should not attract gold stars, but be established as a basic condition of funding. There is also an opportunity to supply culture-related data (e.g., research misconduct reporting, and research staff pay gaps) alongside the other environment data already supplied to support REF-decision making. This could be formative in and of itself, as could the use of case studies (a tested REF assessment technology) by which HEIs report on their research culture interventions.

Whatever is decided, no-one working in a research-intensive institution can deny the power of the additional weight allocated to PCE in REF 2029. The knowledge that 25 per cent of the next exercise will be allocated to not just E, but P and C, has naturally been a lever staff have pulled to get culture issues up the agenda. And we’ve seen significant improvements: policy changes, new initiatives, and culture indicators moving in a good direction. So whilst it might feel like an easier move to simply revert back to the rules of REF 2021, there is an opportunity cost to this. A lot has already been invested in preparing institutions for a greater focus on research culture, and more will need to be invested in reverting back to the rules for REF 2021.

Because of the REF’s direct link both to (unhypothecated) gold and (international) glory, nothing really motivates universities more. To row back on efforts to recognise, incentivise, and reward the thriving research cultures that are at the very heart of any ‘excellent’ research institution therefore makes little sense. And it makes even less sense when financial constraints are putting those environments under even more pressure, making it more important than ever that we put people first. Can we do it in a more sensitive and manageable way? Yes, of course. Should we ditch it and run for the cover of REF 2021 rules? Absolutely not.

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October 7, 2025
Trump’s ‘domestic terrorism’ memo chillingly targets people by ideology

On Thursday, the White House published a presidential memo — technically, a national security presidential memorandum — outlining its upcoming efforts to combat political violence.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a heightened attention to political violence makes sense. But this memo doesn’t focus on actual violence. It includes frequent references to constitutionally protected speech and ideas.

While there are quite a few pieces of this order that set off alarm bells, a few of the phrases struck me as especially troubling. Here they are.

‘anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity’

The memo says:

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.” [ . . . ] Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

This is the most troubling passage in the memo, and there’s stiff competition for that title. This is the White House directly identifying beliefs, pointing the finger at them, and saying, “These are the suspicious people we need to watch.” In America, we shouldn’t target people for their ideologies. We should target them for their actions, full stop.

Recent Democratic administrations have engaged in the same guilt-by-association tactics. During the Obama administration, the IRS targeted nonprofit groups with the words “Tea Party” or “Patriots” in their names, identifying groups by ideology and punishing them by subjecting them to extra processes. And its explanation was that this was just a “shortcut” — other organizations with similar profiles had violated IRS rules, so they jumped to targeting groups that used similar words.

In 2023, the FBI distributed an internal memo linking “ethnically motivated violent extremists” to traditional Catholic ideology, a call for viewpoint-based targeting that was only exposed by a whistleblower and oversight from Congress. In 2022, an internal FBI memo linked the Gadsden flag and other patriotic symbols to violent extremism. And while such links do exist, and it makes sense for law enforcement to identify them, it also risks sweeping up ordinary Americans.

A man carries a Gadsden flag at a Proud Boys rally in Portland, Oregon, 2019.

It may well be that some people who engage in politically motivated violence have anti-American beliefs, oppose the traditional family, or dislike organized religion. They should be prosecuted. And if there’s evidence of conspiracy or concrete steps toward violence, that may warrant an investigation. But we cannot start investigating other people simply because they happen to share those beliefs. Doing so would open the door to investigations of any political movement or ideology if any one of its adherents happened to engage in violence.

‘…designation as a ‘domestic terrorist organization’’

The memo also says:

[T]he Attorney General may recommend that any group or entity whose members are engaged in activities meeting the definition of “domestic terrorism” in 18 U.S.C. 2331(5) merits designation as a “domestic terrorist organization.”

Designating something a domestic terrorist organization sounds like a parallel to the process we use for identifying foreign terrorist organizations (FTO). That process was created by Congress in a statute. Being designated as an FTO triggers a number of legal effects, enabling the government to seize assets, revoke visas, bar entry of non-citizens, and prosecute people who provide any direct help to the organization. Congress has the ability to block or revoke FTO designation, and organizations themselves are entitled to judicial review of the decision to include them on a list.

There is no such process for designating a domestic terrorist organization. In fact, the “domestic terrorist organization” definition proposed here has no legal safeguards and no clear significance. It’s completely made up. It seems an organization so designated will receive extra scrutiny from the federal government until it pleases the attorney general to remove them from the list. Donors, speakers, employees, and members of these organizations will all have their speech chilled for as long as the executive branch sees fit.

It’s hard not to compare this to the Hollywood blacklist during McCarthyism. There were, in fact, real Russian spies elsewhere in America, many of them motivated by their ideological commitment to communism. Some of them were passing nuclear secrets to our rival in the middle of a nuclear arms race, the stakes of which were, potentially, catastrophic beyond all human imagination. Many people on the blacklist did have ties to communism or communist sympathies, as well. But putting people on a list because the government didn’t like their politics violated the freedoms we claimed to be protecting.

‘…politically motivated terrorist acts such as organized doxing…’

“Organized doxing” is a strange phrase.

Doxing (or doxxing) is generally defined as publishing private information that makes someone online personally identifiable. It’s also legal in most places, as long as the information was lawfully obtained and isn’t otherwise part of harassment or incitement efforts. Whether you think that’s bad or not, I don’t know that organizing the effort makes it worse. If someone posts your personal information online, your first question isn’t likely to be, “How many people were involved and what was their political purpose?”

However distasteful it might be in context, doxing is protected speech unless it violates some other existing law. After all, doxing describes much of the basic activity of news media, where otherwise unknown information is found and published, and frequently, that information is personally identifiable. That’s especially true when the “doxing” the government is upset about is information related to public employees in the course of their duties, such as the location of ICE agents.

A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.

The administration itself has arguably been encouraging coordinated doxing efforts to identify people who said cruel things in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When the vice president calls on the public to contact the employers of people who made unkind statements, and there have been groups soliciting submissions of those statements to catalog them, it would take exceptional care on the part of any future participants to avoid their efforts turning into doxing.

If organized doxing is a politically motivated terrorist act when an NGO encourages it, but it’s legal when the White House encourages it, the current administration should remember that it will be leaving that loaded gun on the desk of the next president — who may define “permissible doxing” much differently.

‘Investigate institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations…’

The memo directs that the National Joint Terrorism Task Force and its local offices shall investigate “institutional and individual funders, and officers and employees of organizations, that are responsible for, sponsor, or otherwise aid and abet the principal actors engaging in” political violence, intimidation, or obstruction of the rule of law.

To aid or abet criminal conduct requires knowledge of the conduct. To the extent officers and employees of organizations are knowingly breaking the law, I’d like to think that law enforcement is investigating them anyway. It’s been a few decades since I took criminal law, but I’m pretty sure “investigate people who know they’re breaking the law” was on the first page of the outline. Same with people who are “responsible for” it.

So what this memo is adding, then, is to investigate “institutional and individual funders” who “sponsor” the organizations that aid the principal actors engaged in political violence. That reading is also reflected in a call for the use of financial surveillance tools. It’s also consistent with a Justice Department push to investigate a group tied to billionaire investor and Democratic megadonor George Soros.

If there is evidence that a donor was knowingly funding violence, they should be investigated, but the administration hasn’t actually shown such evidence. They simply assert there is a vast conspiracy on the left — going all the way up to its highest echelons — to fund and foment political violence, and so a sprawling investigation of the president’s ideological and political opponents is justified.

We have already seen orders like this get misused

A missive from the most powerful man in the world carries so much force that it is, inevitably, a blunt instrument. When the president uses his pen to take aim at anything, it will cause a chilling effect.

For example, when President Trump issued an executive order on gender ideology that prohibited federal funding to programs that suggest gender is a spectrum, Texas A&M cancelled an annual drag show and the National Endowment for the Arts reviewed applications for their consistency with the order. Neither of these outcomes were obvious on the face of the order.

What will the overreactions to this new memo look like? Donors ending their support because they don’t want to risk an investigation? Groups being denied bank loans or leases because they’re on a government list with no way to appeal that determination? Activists going underground because they want to challenge an orthodoxy, hiding their opinions from the places where they would otherwise be challenged in the marketplace of ideas?

If this is the plan to save American values, what’s the plan to destroy them look like?

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October 1, 2025
The People Have Fought Back Against the President Before & Can Again w/ Prof. Corey Brettschneider (Malcolm Nance, Black Man Spy)

Higher Education Inquirer : The People Have Fought Back Against the President Before & Can Again w/ Prof. Corey Brettschneider (Malcolm Nance, Black Man Spy)

The People Have Fought Back Against the President Before & Can Again w/ Prof. Corey Brettschneider (Malcolm Nance, Black Man Spy)

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September 25, 2025
$Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work$

Fewer Young People See Math Skills as Very Important in Work

Higher education stakeholders have noted that math anxiety can hold students back from pursuing some disciplines or major programs, but a new analysis from Gallup finds that young Americans over all place less importance on math skills compared to the general population.

While over half of all Americans rate math skills as “very important” in their work (55 percent) and personal (63 percent) lives, only 38 percent of young people (ages 18 to 24) said math skills are very important in their work life and 37 percent in their personal life, according to a December survey of 5,100 U.S. adults.

The survey highlights generational divisions in how math skills are perceived, with adults older than 55 most likely to see math as very important compared to younger adults, and Gen Z least likely to attribute value to math skills.

To Sheila Tabanli, a mathematics professor at Rutgers University, the low ratings point to a lack of perceived connection between math skills and career development, despite the clear correlation she sees.

Tabanli said it can be hard to convince many Gen Z and Alpha students that math content is necessary for their daily lives, in part because access to information is so convenient and they can perform calculations on their phones or online.

“We need to transition from focusing too much on the concept, the domain, the content—which we do love as math people, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it for a living—but students don’t see that connection [to employable skills],” Tabanli said.

When asked how important math skills were for the majority of the U.S. workforce, 40 percent of young adults rated having math skills as very important—the lowest rating of nine skills evaluated, including reading, language, technology and leadership, according to Gallup.

Young people also rated the importance of math skills for the general workforce, as compared to their own lives, the lowest of all age cohorts. Adults ages 55 to 64 (71 percent) and 65 and older (68 percent) were most likely to say math is a very important skill for the general workforce.

Most career competencies that colleges and universities teach, such as those by the National Association for Colleges and Employers, focus on broader skills—including critical thinking, leadership, communication and teamwork—as essential for workplace success. Math can teach students how to solve problems and engage with difficult content, which Tabanli argues are just as important for an early-career professional.

One reason a young adult might not rate math skills highly is because many students face undue math anxiety or a skepticism about their own ability to do math, falling into the belief that they’re not “math people,” Tabanli said.

In response, Tabanli believes professors should help students apply computational skills to their daily lives or link content to other classes to encourage students to invest in their math learning. While this may be an additional step for a faculty member to take, Tabanli considers it a disservice to neglect this connection.

Professors can also strive to make themselves and the content more human and approachable by sharing information about their lives, their careers and why they’re passionate about the subject, Tabanli said.

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August 25, 2025
HE transformation will only succeed when its people feel safe, supported and connected
In UK higher education, compassion is often treated as an optional extra, something to be considered once the metrics are met, the audits are done, and the strategies are signed off. This framing misses the point.

Compassion is not a soft skill or a luxury. It is not something we add in once the “real work” is done. It is a strategic ethic and a way of designing systems, relationships, and institutions that enable people to thrive. It is about recognising suffering and taking meaningful action to alleviate it. It is about creating conditions in which students, colleagues, and leaders can do their best work, sustainably.

In higher education, compassion is often misunderstood, mistaken for sentimentality or seen as incompatible with the rigour and excellence that universities are expected to uphold. This is a false dichotomy. Compassion is not the opposite of academic excellence; it is what makes it possible.

When compassion is embedded into the culture and infrastructure of a university, it doesn’t lower standards, it sustains them. It doesn’t avoid challenges; it enables people to meet challenges without burning out. And it doesn’t replace accountability, it reframes it, through a lens of relational responsibility and shared purpose.

The recent Universities UK report, Transformation and efficiency: towards a new era of collaboration, arrives at a moment of reckoning. The pressures facing the sector, whether financial, regulatory, or reputational, are not new, yet they have intensified. The report offers a clear and necessary diagnosis and outlines seven opportunities for transformation, including developing collaborative structures, sharing services and infrastructure, shared procurement, digital transformation, benchmarking efficiency and strengthening leadership and governance.

These are important and they are also technical – but technical change, while necessary, is not sufficient. What’s missing is the cultural infrastructure that helps these changes take hold and endure. Without it, transformation risks becoming transactional and something done to people, rather than with them. This is where compassion becomes essential and as the connective tissue that binds strategy to sustainability as opposed to being an add-on. Compassion enables us to ask different questions: “What can we change?” AND “How will this change be experienced?” or “How do we become more efficient?” AND “How do we remain human while doing so?”

Addressing burnout

At this time of year, the signs are everywhere: exhaustion, disillusionment, a creeping sense that the work is never done, and the values that brought us into the sector are being eroded by the systems we now work within.

Burnout is not a personal failing; it is a systemic signal. As Maslach and Leiter remind us in The truth about burnout, burnout arises when people face too much work, too little control, and a misalignment of values. These are organisational design problems as opposed to individual resilience problems. If we want transformation, we must prioritise the conditions in which people are expected to transform. Compassion, understood as a framework for action, offers a way to do this. It invites us to design systems that are effective, humane and investing in people’s capacity to give, as opposed to just demanding more.

Humility is also something required of us at this moment, acknowledging that we are all stepping into the unknown; planned change in a complex system is, at best, hopeful fiction. We cannot predict exactly what will emerge and we can choose how we show up in the process.

Compassion gives us permission to not have all the answers and it allows us to hold space for uncertainty, and to move forward anyway, together. Transformation is a collective endeavour and one that will only succeed if we create conditions in which people feel safe enough, supported enough, and connected enough to participate.

Transformation needs cultural infrastructure

Transformation is a human and technical exercise. It emerges or recedes in the spaces between people: how they experience change, how they relate to one another, and how they make sense of their work. Without attention to culture, even the most well-designed reforms risk faltering.

Compassion offers a way to build the cultural infrastructure that transformation requires, inviting different, deeper questions, such as how change will affect relationships, how institutions can recognise and respond to emotional experience, what inclusive design looks like in different contexts, and where the spaces are that enable people to reflect, connect, and recover. These questions are central to whether transformation efforts succeed or stall; culture is the medium through which change happens.

The Covid-19 pandemic gave us a glimpse of what compassionate institutions can look like. Faced with crisis, many universities responded with agility and care; extending deadlines, adapting policies, and prioritising inclusion. These were acts of strategy, not charity. They enabled continuity, protected equity, and demonstrated the sector’s capacity for humane innovation.

They also revealed that compassion, when practised in systems not designed to support it, can come at a cost that is less often acknowledged. The compassion extended to others was not always matched by compassion for self. Many colleagues gave more than they had to give, and when the crisis faded, the systems around them reverted to old norms including rigid timelines, performance metrics and competitive cultures. The emotional weight of compassion is not inevitable; it becomes heavy when systems are misaligned, when care is expected and not enabled. In the right conditions, compassion is a way of working that restores us as opposed to a burden.

This reveals a deeper truth: our systems were never designed to sustain compassion. If we want to embed it beyond moments of crisis, we must treat it as a core institutional value and to recognise that compassion includes ourselves.

Compassion in practice

Here are five shifts that can embed compassion into the fabric of transformation.

1. Reframe wellbeing as strategic infrastructure

Wellbeing is not a side project. It is foundational to performance, retention, and innovation. Institutions could move from monitoring wellbeing to designing it through embedding it in curricula, policies, workload models, and leadership practices.Boundaries can be enacted, encouraged, and celebrated.

2. Recognise and resource emotional experience

The work of care, whether in teaching, research, service, or leadership, is often invisible and undervalued. It can become labour and lead to empathic distress, when systems make it unsustainable. When time, space, and support are present, compassion is a source of meaning and connection. We can name it, measure it, and reward it, factoring it into workload models, promotion criteria, and professional development.

3. Design for relational accountability

Compassionate systems are relational systems. Transformation must ask: how will this affect relationships? What power dynamics are at play? Whether it’s a new assessment policy or a shared service model, the relational impact matters.

4. Create space for reflection and connection

Efficiency is not about doing more with less, it’s about doing the right things well. Institutions must create time and space for colleagues and students to reflect, connect, and recover. This is infrastructure, not an indulgence.

5. Build on what already works

Compassion is not new. Across the sector, there are already informal networks, communities of practice, and relational leadership approaches enacted that embody compassionate principles. The task is to amplify, connect, and learn from them.

The Universities UK report rightly identifies collaboration as a route to transformation. Collaboration is a relational practice as well as a structural arrangement that requires trust, shared purpose, and the ability to navigate differences. These capabilities grow through connection and trust and cannot be mandated; they are human ones, developed through compassion and sustained by culture.

Compassion can also help us rethink our perception of resistance. Too often, “resistance to change” is dismissed as inertia or protectionism when it is often a signal of fear, of loss, of values under threat. Compassionate leadership invites active listening to this signal and responsiveness with transparency, inclusion, and care.

Compassion is a whole-university approach as opposed to be the responsibility of student services or human resources and notably visible in:
- Teaching: through learning environments that prioritise dialogue, inclusion, and mutual respect.
- Support services: by moving from transactional help to meaningful connection.
- Leadership: by sharing power, modelling visibility, and practising relational accountability.
- Policy: by asking, always, how decisions will affect relationships and wellbeing.
The UUK report offers a timely and necessary roadmap for sector-wide transformation. To realise these ambitions, we will need to prioritise our focus on culture and connection alongside systems and structures; compassion is a strategic imperative.

This is an invitation to those leading transformation, to see compassion as a driver of efficiency; to policymakers, to recognise that sustainable change requires care as well as compliance; and to all of us in the sector, to choose compassion for ourselves and others as a way of being and not just as a crisis response.

The future of higher education depends on what we do and critically how we do it and, on the cultures, we choose to develop. If we create the conditions for compassion to thrive in higher education, it will no longer feel like a burden, it will become a source of meaning, connection, and renewal. This is how transformation becomes possible and sustainable.

All views expressed in this blog are entirely those of the authors and do not represent the views or positions of any affiliated organisations or institutions.
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August 18, 2025
Higher Education Inquirer : The Dirty World of Billionaire Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein: Profits Over People

Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder and former chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management, maintained a financial relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that lasted for years and ultimately contributed to Black’s resignation from the firm. Why should HEI be covering this old story? Because the theme, of profits over people, is a major theme in the dirty world of business that permeates US higher education.

Profits Over People

Apollo Global Management, the firm Black co-founded, is one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers, with hundreds of billions of dollars in assets under management across private equity, credit, and real estate. In 2016, Apollo, along with the Vistria Group and Najafi Companies, acquired Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, for over $1.1 billion. The University of Phoenix remains under the control of these owners and continues to operate as a for-profit institution.

Critics of private equity and venture capital in education argue that such firms are driven by short-term profitability rather than long-term institutional quality. This can lead to aggressive marketing, high tuition, cuts to faculty and staff, and diminished student outcomes. In the case of Apollo Global Management’s ownership of the University of Phoenix, concerns have persisted about the potential for cost-cutting and profit-maximizing strategies to undermine the educational mission. For-profit colleges owned by large investment firms have been accused in the past of prioritizing shareholder returns over student success, adding another layer to the public scrutiny of both Apollo and the institutions it controls.

Ties Between Leon Black and Jeffrey Epstein

Between 2012 and 2017, Black paid Jeffrey Epstein approximately $158 million for what he described as financial advice, including tax and estate planning services. A March 2025 report from the Senate Finance Committee revealed that the total amount transferred to Epstein was closer to $170 million, about $12 million more than previously disclosed. In 2023, Black agreed to pay $62.5 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims that some of his payments to Epstein were used to support Epstein’s illicit operations. Black has said publicly that his association with Epstein was a “horrible mistake” and has emphasized that had he known more about Epstein’s criminal activities, he would have cut ties sooner.

Although Black has described his relationship with Epstein as limited, records show that Epstein became one of the original trustees of the Leon Black Family Foundation in 1997. Black also contributed a handwritten poem to a 2003 “50th birthday book” for Epstein, an item that included greetings from other prominent figures. In January 2021, following an independent review by the law firm Dechert LLP that detailed the payments to Epstein, Black announced that he would step down as CEO of Apollo Global Management.

Black has faced several legal challenges connected to allegations of sexual misconduct, many of which reference Epstein. In 2023, “Jane Doe” filed a lawsuit claiming she was assaulted by Black at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse; in April 2025, her lawyers sought to withdraw from the case. In another case, accuser Cheri Pierson alleged rape but withdrew her lawsuit in early 2024. A separate suit filed by Guzel Ganieva, which accused Black of abuse and coercion involving Epstein, was dismissed in 2023. Black has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

Sources

Business Insider

The Daily Beast

ABC News

Wikipedia – Leon Black

Wikipedia – Apollo Global Management

EdSurge

Republic Report

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August 16, 2025
Hack at Columbia University Hits 870K People

A recent hack of Columbia University’s computer system compromised the personal information of hundreds of thousands of people, including students and applicants, new documents show. Over all, about 870,000 individuals were affected by the breach.

The university provided draft notices to officials in Maine and California that it intends to send to affected parties in their states, according to the state attorneys general’s websites. Both states require that their residents be swiftly informed of any breach that includes their data, according to Bloomberg, which reported on the notices.

The notices said a technical outage disrupted some of the university’s IT systems in June, which led university leaders to suspect a possible cybersecurity attack. An investigation revealed that a hacker had taken files from Columbia’s system in May.

The stolen data includes any personal information prospective students provided in their applications or current students gave Columbia over the course of their studies, including their contact details, Social Security numbers, birthdays, demographic information, academic history, financial aid information, insurance details and health information. No patient data from the Columbia University Irving Medical Center seems to have been compromised, according to the notices. The university encouraged those affected to monitor account statements and credit reports to keep an eye out for any fraudulent activity. It also offered them two years of free credit monitoring and identity restoration services from a financial and risk advisory firm.

“We have implemented a number of safeguards across our systems to enhance our security,” the letters read. “Moving forward, we will be examining what additional steps we can take and additional safeguards we can implement to prevent something like this from happening again.”

A public statement from the university’s Office of Public Affairs last week said that since June 24, Columbia has seen no evidence of any further unauthorized access to the university’s system. Starting Aug. 7, the university promised to begin notifying affected students, employees and applicants on a rolling basis via mail.

“We recognize the concern this matter may have raised and appreciate your ongoing patience during this challenging time,” the statement read. “Please know we are committed to supporting the University community.”

A Columbia official previously told Bloomberg that the hacker seemed to be trying to further a “political agenda.” The investigation into the matter also found that the hacker was “highly sophisticated” and “very targeted.”

The alleged hacker, who got in contact with Bloomberg, gave the news outlet 1.6 gigabytes of data, claiming it contained decades’ worth of applications to Columbia. That application data included New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who applied to Columbia but didn’t get in.

Bloomberg confirmed with eight Columbia students and alumni, who applied between 2019 and 2024, that the information about them contained in the data was accurate. They verified that details such as their university-issued ID codes, citizenship statuses and admissions decisions were all correct. The data provided to Bloomberg didn’t contain names, Social Security numbers or birth dates.

The person claiming to be the hacker, who didn’t provide their name, texted Bloomberg that the purpose of the stolen data was to prove the university continued affirmative action in admissions after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against such practices. They claimed to have hacked about 460 gigabytes of data total from the university—including 1.8 million Social Security numbers of employees, students and their family members—after spending more than two months ensuring their access to Columbia’s computer systems.

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August 12, 2025
Exploring the diversity of people the world over

At the age of 9, Hannah Choo found herself shuttled across the Pacific Ocean from California to Seongnam, South Korea. She found herself living in a city, about an hour from Seoul, where everything from language to climate was different.

She’d grown up in sunny, suburban, slow-paced Pasadena in Southern California and wasn’t happy at first about the move.

“When I first arrived, the honking of cars at night was so loud that I couldn’t fall asleep,” Choo said.

But now, seven years later, she realizes that the experience of living in two starkly different cities has given her a better understanding of people. And this is important because Choo wants to be a journalist.

She has joined News Decoder as a summer intern, bringing with her an interest in communities and how they collectivize and support themselves.

“Korea has made me look deeper into how people differ experientially, not just in terms of surface factors like race or ethnicity or where they’re from,” she said. “I think there’s a lot of diversity in Korea with what people go through in their lives.”

Appreciating cultural differences

The homogenous culture of South Korea gives Choo a strong sense of community and has helped her realise that people’s differences are not defined by where they come from.

For News Decoder, Choo brings the perspective of a young person, which is valuable to an organization devoted to helping youth process global events and the confusing digital world that consumes them.

Consider her work with Amina McCauley, who leads News Decoder’s EYES program — Empowering Youth Through Environmental Storytelling — a two-year project to create a climate change curriculum that can be implemented in schools across the globe.

“Hannah has been helping me critique News Decoder’s climate journalism educational materials,” McCauley said. “As the EYES project enters its phase of dissemination, Hannah’s curiosity and understanding of depth is helping the curriculum to become stronger and more relevant for the young people of today.”

McCauley said that Choo is thoughtful and critical, but that it is her way of interacting with others that is her best asset.

“She brings me trust in future generations,” McCauley said.

Working with News Decoder

Choo said she wanted to work with News Decoder because of the way it spotlights the human side of news, and how lives are impacted by everyday events.

“I feel like News Decoder aims to really empower students to not just write a story in general, but also how to incorporate their own voice into that while sticking with the rules of journalism,” Choo said.

Choo will also help News Decoder bolster its social media. In the coming weeks, she will be working with News Decoder’s Program and Communication Manager Cathal O’Luanaigh on her own series of posts on News Decoder’s social media pages and working with its Educational News Director Marcy Burstiner on articles related to climate change, people and culture.

Burstiner said that when Choo first came to News Decoder it was as if she knew exactly what was wanted of her. “She has a great instinct for news, for seeing the story that hasn’t been told and that needs to be told,” Burstiner said. “For News Decoder, South Korea is a country that has been underreported. I’m really looking forward to her stories.”

Ultimately, Choo hopes to tell stories about people in many different places.

“I see myself travelling the world and visiting different communities and really hearing their stories, and being able to present it in a way that’s authentic to them,” she said. “And showing that to the rest of the world and allowing other people to also see all of these unique parts of a global culture that you never really get a spotlight on.”

Telling global stories

What she has learned so far in her travels from California to South Korea is that there is great satisfaction in adapting to a new culture.

While there was no language barrier for Choo when she moved to Seongnam, having spoken Korean with her parents since she was a child, the noise and way of living there needed some getting used to. But what she at first found so different, she now finds comfort in.

Everything she needs outside of her apartment complex, which is wrapped by four different roads, is just a short subway, drive or walk away. And with community comes safety.

“I always tell people that you could leave your laptop on top of a coffee shop table and expect to find it there again an hour later,” Choo said.

There are still challenges.

Korean schools are hyper competitive and getting into a prestigious university is important. This means that in high school, students are so focused on getting good grades that their mental health often suffers.

Young people prioritise studying for tests over sleep and a social life. They compare themselves to each other and base their self worth on academic performance.

“That creates pretty toxic dynamics between people,” she said. “Beating out the competition, I think, is a huge narrative here.”

This also means that school and learning is centred on grades, so that critical thinking and interest is of much lower importance.

“Studying in any school in Korea, even if international, means you’re still affected by the culture,” Choo said.

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July 17, 2025
A decade connecting young people to the world they live in

To understand the chaos that is the world today it helps to look back a decade.

This past year, world representatives met at COP29 to fight climate change in a place led by an authoritarian regime dependent on fossil fuels. The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been massacring Palestinians in Gaza. The United States bombed Iran in an attempt to eliminate its nuclear capability. And U.S. President Donald Trump and an increasing number of European leaders have closed their doors to immigrants and refugees.

In great contrast, when News Decoder launched 10 years ago, 196 nations signed onto the landmark agreement known as the Paris Accords, ushering in the hope that together we could cool down the planet. The administration of then-U.S. President Barack Obama signed a historic agreement with Iran, in which Iran would get rid of 97% of its supply of enriched uranium. A million refugees flooded into Europe from conflicts in Syria and elsewhere.

In the years in between, the world locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic, Great Britain exited the European Union, the #MeToo movement erupted across the world, nations across the globe began legalizing same sex marriage, Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump got elected, tossed out and re-elected and we began ceding everything to artificial intelligence.

Can you imagine coming of age in that world?

Decoding world events

When Nelson Graves founded News Decoder to help young people “decode” the world through news, it seemed that we lived in an age of optimism. Now young people feel helpless and disconnected. In April 2024, the World Economic Forum reported that young people worldwide are increasingly unhappy and this trend would have real consequences for the future.

“We live in a world where teenagers grapple with a sense of crisis before adulthood; a time when young people, historically beacons of optimism, report lower happiness than their elders,” the report said.

But even back in 2015, Nelson knew things would change. He’d spent years as a foreign correspondent covering world events.

“Anyone with a sense of history and someone with experience in following current events — especially a foreign correspondent — would have known that the world is most likely to change when you’re least expecting it,” he said. “Nothing is immutable — except the truism that the political pendulum is always swinging.”

The roots of Brexit, the Make America Great Again movement in the United States and antipathy towards immigrants were already deep in 2015, even if they were largely underground and out of sight, he said.

A decade later, News Decoder’s mission of connecting young people to the world around them seems more relevant than ever.

For 10 years, the high school students News Decoder has worked with have explored — through articles, podcasts, videos and photo essays and in live, cross-border dialogues — how problems in their communities connect to things happening elsewhere in the world. In 2016, for instance, a student studying abroad in China worked with News Decoder to explore how growing consumerism was leading to mountains of trash and created an army of people who mined that trash building up around them.

That same year in an online roundtable, News Decoder brought together students from the Greens Farms Academy in the United States with students from Kings Academy in Jordan, Aristotle University in Greece and School Year Abroad in France to discuss the ongoing war in Syria and the worldwide crisis of Syrian refugees.

Kindling curiosity

One of the Greens Farms Academy students who participated, Samyukt Kumar, further explored the topic in an article News Decoder published that year. Looking back, he now tells, the practical experience it gave him was valuable.

“Less for the substance but more for the practical experience,” he said. “My views on these topics evolved significantly as I received greater education and real-world exposure. But I still reap the benefits from gaining more confidence in my writing, learning to embrace the editing process and engaging my curiosity about the world.”

In 2017, a News Decoder student at Haverford College in the United States explored the problem of migrants flooding into her home country of Italy. She came to this conclusion:

“The roots of the problem lie outside of Italy, which nonetheless bears a heavy burden as the first EU destination for thousands of Africans crossing the Mediterranean,” she wrote. “A solution to the migration crisis depends not only on Italy’s good will — now being stretched to the limits — but also on the willingness of the rest of Europe and the international community to tackle the armed conflicts, poverty and human rights abuses that stir so many Africans to attempt the perilous Mediterranean crossing.”

Fast forward to 2025. News Decoder worked with high school students in the British Section at the Lycée International Saint-Germain-en-Laye outside of Paris to take what they learned about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and find and tell narrative stories through podcasts. They explored such things as the problem of poverty in resource-rich areas of Africa and the connection between actions of multinational corporations and climate change.

Crossing borders

In Switzerland, News Decoder worked with students at Realgymnasium Rämibühl Zürich on a series of articles that explored gender inequity in sports, the connection between social media and the decline of democracy, how a local community is affected when it hosts a world conference and the connection between the quality of life in a country and the people’s willingness to pay for that through high prices and high taxes.

And in monthly “Decoder Dialogues” News Decoder put together students from countries such as the United States, Colombia, France, India, Belgium and Rwanda in online roundtables to discuss such topics as the future of journalism, climate action, censorship, leadership and artificial intelligence.

Through the exploration of a problem in the world, by seeking out experts who can put it into context and by seeking out different perspectives from other places, students make sense out of chaos. They begin to see that there are people out there thinking about these problems in different ways and seeking solutions to them.

Ultimately, the message News Decoder wants students to take away is that you don’t need to run from complicated problems. You don’t need to disengage from the news and the events happening around you. By delving more into a topic or issue or controversy, you can begin to understand it and see the path forward.

At News Decoder, we believe people should be able to listen to each other and exchange viewpoints to work through problems across differences and borders. Back in 2015, Graves posed this challenge: How to tap into the intellectual energy of the generation that will soon assume leadership in business, government, academia and social enterprise?

For the past 10 years we have worked to empower young people by giving them the information they need, connecting them to the world around them and providing them a forum for expression. For a decade we have helped them find coherence out of the chaos around them — and we intend to continue doing that for the next 10 years.

One thing we know: 10 years from now the world will be a lot different from what it is now.

“While no one has a perfect crystal ball, you can be sure that nothing remains unchanged for long,” Graves said. “Yesterday’s mortal enemy can become a fast friend — think of U.S. relations with Vietnam since the 1950s. Lesson: Always expect change, even if you can’t anticipate the precise contours, and don’t project linearly into the future. As ever, keep an open mind and beware confirmation bias.”

That’s the message News Decoder tries to instill in the young people we work with. After all, a decade from now, they will be the ones making that change happen.

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July 4, 2025