Higher education today demands that we strip away illusions. The university is no longer a sanctuary of truth but a contested battleground of austerity, automation, and alienation. Students, adjuncts, and staff are caught in a cycle of debt, precarity, and surveillance. To resist, we need not another glossy strategic plan but a syllabus — a curriculum of solidarity, transparency, and rehumanization.
Debt defines the student experience. Student loan balances now exceed $1.77 trillion, and repayment programs like PSLF and income-driven repayment offer only partial relief. In 2024, as federal student loan payments resumed after a pandemic pause, millions of borrowers simply refused to pay, transforming individual debt into collective action. The Debt Collective has organized strikes and campaigns to cancel student debt, reframing borrowing as a political issue rather than a private burden. This movement challenges whether the entire financing model of higher education can survive.
Faculty labor is equally precarious. More than seventy percent of instructors are contingent, often earning poverty wages without benefits. At Harrisburg Area Community College, over 200 faculty went on strike in November 2025 after years of stalled negotiations, exemplifying a growing national labor movement against stagnant pay and weakened job security. Adjunct faculty unions at Rutgers and elsewhere continue to push back against layoffs and austerity measures. The crisis of contingent labor has moved from quiet exploitation to open confrontation.
Climate crisis compounds the meltdown. Universities expand globally in a frenzy of collegemania, while ignoring ecological collapse. Student activists demand divestment from fossil fuels, but boards often resist. At Princeton, campaigners uncovered that the university owns a controlling stake in PetroTiger, a fossil fuel company, profiting directly from extraction. Edge Hill University in the UK recently committed to divest from both fossil fuels and border security companies after sustained student pressure. The University of Illinois, despite pledging to divest years ago, still faces protests demanding action. These campaigns show that climate justice is inseparable from educational justice.
Surveillance intensifies alienation. Universities increasingly deploy corporate partnerships and AI tools to monitor student dissent. At the University of Houston, administrators contracted with Dataminr to scrape students’ social media activity during Palestine solidarity protests. Amnesty International has warned that tools like Palantir and Babel Street pose surveillance threats to student activists. Truthout reports that campuses have become laboratories for military-grade surveillance technology, punishing dissent and eroding trust. Education becomes transactional and disciplinary, leaving students reporting higher levels of stress and disconnection.
Resistance must also be moral. University governance remains hierarchical and opaque, resembling corporate boards more than democratic institutions. Calls for transparency and veritas are drowned out by branding campaigns and political capture. A pedagogy of resistance must be rooted in temperance, nonviolence, and solidarity. Rehumanization is the antidote to robostudents, roboworkers, and robocolleges. It is the refusal to be bots, debtors, or disposable labor, and the insistence on reclaiming education as a public good.
Developing a Democratic Syllabus of Resistance
This syllabus is not a catalog of courses but a call to action. Debt strikes, adjunct unionization, climate divestment campaigns, and surveillance pushback are fragments of a larger curriculum of resistance. But this syllabus is incomplete without you. Readers are invited to join in creating it — to add new units, case studies, and strategies that reflect the lived realities of students, workers, and communities.
For inspiration, see the Higher Education Inquirer’s earlier piece on Methods of Student Nonviolent Resistance, which documents the long history of campus activism and the evolving tactics of protest, persuasion, and noncooperation. That archive reminds us that resistance is not only possible but essential.
At SRHE’s Annual Conference 2025, I gave a paper which argued that community, collegiality and care were key elements of the writing groups and retreats I’ve facilitated for female academics. I used Massey’s heuristic device of activity space to foreground interactions of gender, space and power in those writing interventions. I concluded that in embodying community, collegiality and care, they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the geographies of power operating across universities and the individualised, competitive neo-liberal academy.
Academics must write. Written outputs are one of the principal means by which academics enact professional capital as experts and specialists in their disciplinary fields (French, 2020 p1605). Scholarly publications are central to individual and institutional success in the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF). Writing does not automatically or quickly lead to publication and just finding the time to write productively presents challenges at all career stages. But as Murray and Newton state: ‘the writing element of research is not universally experienced as a mainstream activity’ (Murray and Newton, 2009 p551).
Applying Massey’s analytical tool of activity space: ‘the spatial network of links and activities, of spatial connections and of locations within which a particular agent operates’ (2005 p55)to this context, we can imagine the UK HE sector as an activity space shaped by networks and power relationships of disciplines, governance, financial and knowledge capitals, metrics and institutional audit. We can also imagine the sector’s 160 universities as nodes within that wider activity space. Massey coins the term ‘power geometry’ to describe how individuals and groups are differently positioned in relation to different geographies of power in activity spaces. For example, UK universities are more or less powerfully positioned across a spectrum of elite, pre-1992 and post-1992 institutions.
We can also consider each university as an activity space, with its own spatial networks and connections shaped by the wider sector and by regional and local factors. These are enacted within each university through systems of management, workload and performance, creating the environments within which ‘agents’ – staff and students – work and study. Academics in more senior ranks, with higher salaries and research-focused roles are more likely to produce scholarly publications (McGrail, Rickard and Jones, 2006). And while the relationship between research and teaching is a troubled one across the sector, this tension is exacerbated for academics located in post-1992 institutions, many describing themselves as ‘teaching intensive’. Research and publication remain strategic corporate priorities for post-1992s, yet workload allocation is heavily weighted towards teaching and pastoral support.
So, in relation to academic writing and publication, academics are also differentially positioned, more and less powerfully, within the activity space of the university. One of the key factors influencing that positioning is gender. If we scratch the statistical surface of the UK HE landscape we find longstanding gender inequality which is proving glacially slow to shift. Women form an overall majority of UK sector employees in academic and professional services roles but 49% of academic staff, 33% of Heads of Institution and 31% of Professors are women (Advance HE, 2024). They predominate in part-time, teaching-only and precarious contracts, all of which play a role in slowing or stalling academic career progression. These data cannot be seen in isolation from women’s disproportionate responsibilities for pastoral and informal service roles within the university and gendered social roles which place a burden of care for family, household and caring on many women of all working ages.
Academic writing groups and retreats are a popular response to the challenge of writing productively. They can ‘be a method of improving research outputs’ (Wardale, 2015 p1297); demystify the process of scholarly writing (Lee and Boud, 2003 p190), and ‘enable micro-environments in what is perceived of as an otherwise often unfriendly mainstream working environment’ (ibid). Groups and retreats are often targeted at different academic career stages and/or specific groups within the academic workforce. Since 2020, as critical higher education academic and diversity worker, I have run online writing groups and in-person writing retreats for female academics at all career stages, most employed at my own post-1992 university. Over 140 individuals have participated in one or other of the interventions and I used a range of methods (survey, interview, focus group) to gather data on their motivations, experiences and outcomes.
The combined data of all three studies show that the primary motivation of every participant was to create protected space for writing, space not made sufficiently available to them within working hours, despite the professional expectation that they will produce scholarly publications. In this context, the meaning of ‘space’ is multi-dimensional: encompassing the temporal, the physical and the intellectual. The consequence of the interaction of protected temporal and physical/virtual space is intellectual space, or what was referred to by several participants as ‘headspace’ – the extended focus and concentration necessary to produce high quality scholarly writing (Couch, Sullivan and Malatsky, 2020) .
When I launched the online writing group (WriteSpace) during the UK’s first COVID-19 lockdown, MS Teams software enabled the creation of a virtual ‘writing room’ and a sense of community over distance. Socially-isolated colleagues sought contact with others, even those previously unknown to them. As lockdown restrictions eased and remote, then hybrid, working arrangements ensued, the act of writing alongside others virtually or in-person remained an important way to engage in a shared endeavour. The in-person residential retreats in 2023 and 2024, followed Murray’s structured retreat model (Murray and Newton, 2009 p543). Participants wrote together in one room, for the same time periods over three days. They also ate, walked and socialised together.
Each of the writing interventions were multi-disciplinary spaces for female academics at all career stages, including those undertaking part-time doctoral study. Whatever their grade or experience, no one individual’s writing was more important or significant than another’s. These hierarchically flat spaces disrupted the normative power relationships of the workplace and the academy. On the retreats, additional practices of goal setting and review in pairs encouraged ongoing reflection and exchange on writing practices and developing academic identities.
Many participants experienced the facilitation of the groups and retreats as professional care – a colleague taking responsibility for timekeeping, recommending breaks and stimulating reflection on writing practices. The experience of care was extended and heightened at the residential retreats because all meals were provided in a comfortable and peaceful environment and no household chores were required. This was particularly significant in the context of women’s social roles and conditioning to care for others.
Viewing these writing interventions as activity spaces situated within the wider contexts of the university and the UK HE sector foregrounds interactions of power, space and gender in the context of academic writing. The writing interventions were not neutral phenomena. They were deliberately initiated and targeted in response to a gendered imbalance of power in the academy and the university. They were occupied solely by women. They intentionally prioritise temporal, physical and intellectual space for writing over teaching, administrative, pastoral, household and domestic responsibilities. Within them, academic writing becomes a social practice and a common endeavour.
The interventions do not remove longstanding and pervasive gender inequality across the UK sector, change gendered social roles, resolve the tensions between teaching and research in the contemporary neoliberal academy, nor increase workload allocation for academic writing. However, in embodying community, collegiality and care they can potentially be seen as activity spaces of resistance to the normative geographies of power operating across universities and the wider sector.
Kate Carruthers Thomas is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Gender at Birmingham City University. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing on educational, sociological and geographical theories and methods. She also has a track record in creative research dissemination including graphics, poetry and podcasting.
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
The mother was just arriving to pick up her girls at their elementary school in Chicago when someone with a bullhorn at the nearby shopping center let everyone know: ICE is here.
The white van screeched to a halt right next to where she was parked, and three Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents piled out. They said something in English that she couldn’t decipher, then arrested her on the spot. Her family later said they never asked about her documentation.
She was only able to get one phone call out before she was taken away. “The girls,” was all she said to her sister. Her daughters, a third grader and a fourth grader, were still waiting for her inside the school.
Luckily, the girls’ child care provider had prepared for this very moment.
Sandra had been taking care of the girls since they were babies, and now watched them after school. She’d been encouraging the family to get American passports for the kids and signed documents detailing their wishes should the mother be detained.
When Sandra got the call that day in September, she headed straight to the school to pick up the girls.
Since President Donald Trump won a second term, Sandra has been prepping the 10 families at her home-based day care, including some who lack permanent legal status, for the possibility that they may be detained. (The 19th is only using Sandra’s first name and not naming the mother to protect their identities.)
She’s worked with families to get temporary guardianship papers sorted and put a plan in place in case they were detained and their kids were left behind. She even had a psychologist come and speak to the families about the events that had been unfolding across the country to help the children understand that there are certain situations their parents can’t control, and give them the opportunity to talk through their fears that, one day, mamá and papá might not be there to pick them up.
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And for two elementary school kids, that day did come. Sandra met them outside the school.
“When they saw me, they knew something wasn’t right,” Sandra said in Spanish. “Are we never going to see our mom again?” they asked.
For all her planning, she was speechless.
“One prepares for these things, but still doesn’t have the words on what to say,” Sandra said.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
After that day, Sandra worked with the mother’s sister to get the girls situated to fly to Texas, where their mother, who had full custody of them, was being detained, and then eventually to Mexico. She hasn’t heard from them in over a month. The girls were born in the United States and know nothing of Mexico.
“I think about them in a strange country,” Sandra said. “‘Who is going to care for them like I do?’ Now with this situation I get sad because I think they are the ones who are going to suffer.”
In this year of immigration raids, child care providers have stepped up to keep families unified amid incredible uncertainty. Some are agreeing to be temporary guardians for kids should something happen to their parents. The workers themselves are also under threat — 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrant women, most of them Latinas, who are also having to prepare in case they are detained, particularly while children are in their care. Already, child care workers across the country have been detained and deported.
“The immigration and the child care movements, they are one in the same now,” said Anali Alegria, the director of federal advocacy and media relations at the Child Care for Every Family Network, a national child care advocacy group. “Child care is not just something that keeps the economy going, while it does. It’s also really integral to people’s community and family lives. And so when you’re destabilizing it, you’re also destabilizing something much more fundamental and very tender to that child and that family’s life.”
A loose network of resistance has emerged, with detailed protection plans, ICE lookout patrols, and Signal or Whatsapp chats. Home-based providers like Sandra have been especially involved in that effort because their work often means their lives are even more intertwined with the families they care for.
“All the families we have in our program, I consider them family. We arrive in this country and we don’t have family, and when we get support, advice or the simple act of caring for kids, as child care providers we are essential in many of these families — even more in these times,” said Sandra, who has been caring for children in the United States for 25 years. All the families she cares for are Latinx, 70 percent without permanent legal status.
According to advocacy groups, child care providers are increasingly being asked to look after kids in case they are detained, typically because they are the only trusted person the family knows with U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residence. Parents are asking child care workers to be emergency contacts, short-term guardians and, in some cases, even long-term guardians.
“We heard this under the first Trump administration, and we’re hearing it much more now. It’s not so much a matter of if, but when, right now, and it used to be the other way around,” said Wendy Cervantes, the director of immigration and immigrant families at the Center for Law and Social Policy, an anti-poverty nonprofit. “It adds just additional stress and trauma because they deeply care about these kids. Many of them have kids of their own and obviously have modest incomes, so as much as they want to say, ‘yes’, they can’t in some cases.”
The question was posed to Claudia Pellecer a couple weeks ago. A home-based child care provider in Chicago for 17 years, Pellecer cares for numerous Latinx families, at least one of whom doesn’t have permanent legal status.
In October, one of those moms was due to appear before ICE for a regular check-in as part of her ongoing asylum case. But she knew that many have been detained at those appointments this year.
The mother asked Pellecer to be her 1-year-old son’s legal guardian should she be taken away.
“I couldn’t say no because I am human, I am a mother,” Pellecer said.
Claudia Pellecer, who runs a small daycare for young children out of her home, stands for a portrait outside her house. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th
They got to work getting the baby a passport and filling out the necessary guardianship paperwork. Pellecer kept the originals and copies. The mother closed her bank account, cleaned out her apartment and prepped two bags, one for her and one for the baby. If the mother was deported, Pellecer would fly with him to meet her in Ecuador, they agreed.
The day of the appointment, she dropped the baby off with Pellecer and set the final plan. Her appointment was at 1 p.m. “If at 6 p.m. you haven’t heard from me, that means I was detained,” she told Pellecer, who cried and wished her luck.
At the appointment, the judge asked her three sets of questions:
“Why are you here?”
“Are you working? Do you have a family?”
“Do you have proof of what happened to you in your country?”
Claudia Pellecer plays games with children in the living room of her home daycare, where she cares for up to eight young children a day. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th
The judge agreed to let her stay and told her to continue working. The mother won’t have a court date again until 2027.
“We learned our lesson,” Pellecer said. “We had to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
But their relief was short-lived. Recent events in Chicago have sent child care workers and families into panic, as the people who have tried to keep families together are now being targeted.
Resistance networks have sprung up rapidly in Chicago in recent weeks after a child care worker was followed to Spanish immersion day care Rayito de Sol on the city’s North Side and arrested in front of children and other teachers. The arrest was caught on camera and has sparked demonstrations across the city.
Erin Horetski, whose son, Harrison, was cared for by the worker who was arrested at Rayito de Sol in early November, said parents there had been worried ICE might one day target them because the center specifically hired Spanish-speaking staff.
The morning of the arrest, parents were texting each other once they heard ICE was in the shopping center where the day care is located.
Children crawl on a colorful rug while playing educational games at Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th
Her husband was just arriving to drop off their boys as ICE was leaving. The first thing out of his mouth when he called her: “They took Miss Diana.”
Agents entered the school without a warrant to arrest infant class teacher Diana Patricia Santillana Galeano, an immigrant from Colombia. DHS said part of the reason for her arrest was because she helped bring her two teenage children across the southern U.S. border this year. “Facilitating human smuggling is a crime,” DHS said. Santillana Galeano fled Colombia fearing for her safety in 2023, filed for asylum and was given a work permit through November 2029, according to court documents. She has no known criminal record. After her arrest, a federal judge ruled that her detention without access to a bond hearing was illegal and she was released November 12.
Horetski said the incident, the first known ICE arrest inside a day care, has spurred the community to action. A GoFundMe account set up by Horetski to support Santillana Galeano, has raised more than $150,000.
Horetski said what’s been lost in the story of what happened at Rayito is the humanity of the person at the center of it, someone she said was “like a second mother” to her son.
“At the end of the day, she was a person and a friend and a mother and provider to our kids — I think we need to remember that,” Horetski said.
Now, the parents are the ones coming together to put in place a safety plan for the teachers, most of whom have continued to come to the school and care for their children.
They are working on establishing a safe passage patrol, setting up parents with whistles at the front of the school to stand guard during arrival and dismissal time to ensure teachers can come and go to their cars or to public transit safely. Parents are also establishing escorts for teachers who may need a ride to work or someone to accompany them on the bus or the train. A meal train set up by the parents is helping to send food to the teachers through Thanksgiving, and two local restaurants have pitched in with discounts. Some of the parents are also lawyers who are considering setting up a legal clinic to ensure workers know their rights, Horetski said.
A young child watches an educational TV show in the living room of Claudia Pellecer’s home daycare in Chicago. Credit: Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th
Figuring out how to come together to support teachers and the children who now have questions about safety is something that “continues to circle in all of our minds and brains,” Horeski said. “It’s hard to not have the answers or know how to best move forward. We’re in such uncharted territory that you’re like, ‘Where do you go from here?’ So we’re kind of paving that because this is the first time that something like this has happened.”
Prep is top of mind now for organizers including at the Service Employees International Union, where Sandra and Pellecer are members,who are convening emergency child care worker trainings to set up procedures, such as posted signs that say ICE cannot enter without a warrant, showing them what the warrants must include to be binding, helping them set a designated person to speak to ICE should they enter and talking to their families to offer support.
Cervantes has been doing this work since Trump’s first term, when it was clear immigration was going to be a key focus for the president. This year has been different, though. Child care centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office this year, signaling a more aggressive approach to ICE enforcement was coming.
Cervantes and her team are currently in the midst of a research project about child care workers across the country, conversations that are also illuminating for them just how dire the situation has become for providers.
“We are asking providers to make protocols for what is basically a man-made disaster,” she said. “They shouldn’t have to worry about protecting children and staff from the government.”
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Although the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) were released more than a decade ago, adoption of them varies widely in California. I have been to districts that have taken the standards and run with them, but others have been slow to get off the ground with NGSS–even 12 years after their release. In some cases, this is due to a lack of funding, a lack of staffing, or even administrators’ lack of understanding of the active, student-driven pedagogies championed by the NGSS.
Another potential challenge to implementing NGSS with fidelity comes from teachers’ and administrators’ epistemological beliefs–simply put, their beliefs about how people learn. Teachers bring so much of themselves to the classroom, and that means teaching in a way they think is going to help their students learn. So, it’s understandable that teachers who have found success with traditional lecture-based methods may be reluctant to embrace an inquiry-based approach. It also makes sense that administrators who are former teachers will expect classrooms to look the same as when they were teaching, which may mean students sitting in rows, facing the front, writing down notes.
Based on my experience as both a science educator and an administrator, here are some strategies for encouraging both teachers and administrators to embrace the NGSS.
For teachers: Shift expectations and embrace ‘organized chaos’
A helpful first step is to approach the NGSS not as a set of standards, but rather a set of performance expectations. Those expectations include all three dimensions of science learning: disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), science and engineering practices (SEPs), and cross-cutting concepts (CCCs). The DCIs reflect the things that students know, the SEPs reflect what students are doing, and the CCCs reflect how students think. This three-dimensional approach sets the stage for a more active, engaged learning environment where students construct their own understanding of science content knowledge.
To meet expectations laid out in the NGSS, teachers can start by modifying existing “recipe labs” to a more inquiry-based model that emphasizes student construction of knowledge. Resources like the NGSS-aligned digital curriculum from Kognity can simplify classroom implementation by providing a digital curriculum that empowers teachers with options for personalized instruction. Additionally, the Wonder of Science can help teachers integrate real-life phenomena into their NGSS-aligned labs to help provide students with real-life contexts to help build an understanding of scientific concepts related to. Lastly, Inquiry Hub offers open-source full-year curricula that can also aid teachers with refining their labs, classroom activities, and assessments.
For these updated labs to serve their purpose, teachers will need to reframe classroom management expectations to focus on student engagement and discussion. This may mean embracing what I call “organized chaos.” Over time, teachers will build a sense of efficacy through small successes, whether that’s spotting a studentconstructing their own knowledge or documenting an increased depth of knowledge in an entire class. The objective is to build on student understanding across the entire classroom, which teachers can do with much more confidence if they know that their administrators support them.
For administrators: Rethink evaluations and offer support
Arecent survey found that 59 percent of administrators in California, where I work, understood how to support teachers with implementing the NGSS. Despite this, some administrators may need to recalibrate their expectations of what they’ll see when they observe classrooms. What they might see is organized chaos happening: students out of their seats, students talking, students engaged in all different sorts of activities. This is what NGSS-aligned learning looks like.
To provide a clear focus on student-centered learning indicators, they can revise observation rubrics to align with NGSS, or make their lives easier and use this one. As administrators track their teachers’ NGSS implementation, it helps to monitor their confidence levels. There will always be early implementers who take something new and run with it, and these educators can be inspiring models for those who are less eager to change.
The overall goal for administrators is to make classrooms safe spaces for experimentation and growth. The more administrators understand about the NGSS, the better they can support teachers in implementing it. They may not know all the details of the DCIs, SEPs, and CCCs, but they must accept that the NGSS require students to be more active, with the teacher acting as more of a facilitator and guide, rather than the keeper of all the knowledge.
Based on my experience in both teaching and administration roles, I can say that constructivist science classrooms may look and sound different–with more student talk, more questioning, and more chaos. By understanding these differences and supporting teachers through this transition, administrators ensure that all California students develop the deeper scientific thinking that NGSS was designed to foster.
Nancy Nasr, Ed.D., Santa Paula Unified School District
Nancy Nasr is a science educator and administrator at Santa Paula Unified School District. She can be reached at [email protected].
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Dr. Karsonya “Kaye” Wise WhiteheadThe Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) has issued a forceful condemnation of the White House’s directive calling for a comprehensive review of Smithsonian Institution museums, warning that the move represents an attempt to “erase or distort” Black history.
The directive follows President Donald Trump’s social media post attacking the Smithsonian museums as “OUT OF CONTROL,” claiming they focus only on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.” The White House subsequently ordered a full review of all archival materials to determine alignment with Executive Order 14235, aimed at “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History.”
“ASALH stands in fierce opposition to this latest directive and all efforts to erase or distort our history, to silence our voices, and to minimize our story,” said ASALH President Dr. Karsonya “Kaye” Wise Whitehead.
The 110-year-old organization, which founded Black History Month, partnered with the African American Policy Forum to co-lead a “Hands Off Our History” rally at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington, D.C.
Whitehead characterized the museum review as part of a broader pattern of attacks on diversity and inclusion efforts. She cited the 2023 banning of over 10,000 books, many featuring people of color, and recent executive orders eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs in higher education, medicine, and K-12 history courses.
“These steps are veiled attempts to rewrite and distort the narrative by removing any mention of the racist actions, words, and deeds that have shaped American history,” Whitehead added.
The ASALH president described the current moment as part of an escalating campaign that began with what she termed the “whitelash election” of 2017, followed by increased white supremacy after George Floyd’s murder, and culminating in current efforts to “defund libraries, whitewash history curricula, zero-base the Department of Education.”
ASALH, founded in 1915, positions itself as a bridge between scholars and the public in preserving and promoting Black history. The organization is preparing for its annual conference in Atlanta, scheduled for September 24-28, 2025, which Whitehead said will serve as an opportunity to “organize and prepare ourselves to counter his next steps.”
The controversy highlights ongoing tensions over how American history is taught and presented in educational and cultural institutions, with particular focus on narratives involving slavery, civil rights, and systemic racism.
Whitehead added that the organization’s resistance draws inspiration from historical figures including Dr. Carter G. Woodson, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, and Harriet Tubman, stating: “Our work as truth seekers obliges us to ‘speak the truth to the people’ and demands that we stay ready.”
The Smithsonian Institution has not yet responded to requests for comment regarding the White House directive.
Researchers and the academic community may have reason to be hopeful about the future of federal funding. Early indications from the appropriations process suggest that both the House and Senate will diverge significantly from the president’s federal budget proposal for science and technology for the next fiscal year.
In May, the White House released its budget proposal that aims to reduce federal research and development funding by nearly a quarter, according to an analysis from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. It also proposed eliminating funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Congress still has months of negotiations before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1 but, so far, funding for science has received bipartisan support in appropriations meetings—though the House appears more willing to make significant cuts than the Senate.
In a July 10 Senate Appropriations Committee meeting, legislators put forth a cut to the National Science Foundation (NSF) of only $16 million compared to the more than $5 billion proposed by Trump. Four days later, a House Appropriations Committee subcommittee suggested slashing $2 billion—less than half of Trump’s proposal.
Alessandra Zimmermann, budget analyst and senior manager for the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s R&D Budget and Policy Program, highlighted in a statement the Senate’s proposal and noted that the House’s over 20 percent proposed cut to NSF is still “a much smaller decrease than the Administration’s initial request.”
“This shows that there is bipartisan support for investing in basic research, and putting the U.S. on track for FY26,” Zimmermann said. “The story of the future of science is still being written, and we appreciate the strong support from Congress.”
The House has also suggested increasing by $160 million funding for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science—rejecting the White House’s planned 14 percent cut. The House has floated cutting NASA’s Science Mission Directorate by $1.3 billion, or 18 percent, but that’s still better than Trump’s proposal to nearly halve that budget. The House also proposed $288 million for the Fulbright scholarship, a highly selective cultural exchange program that Trump had recommended eliminating.
The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment Friday.
Bipartisan Support for R&D
Congressional Republicans have remained in lock step with the second Trump administration. Early grumbles about the One Big Beautiful Bill were silent when the House passed it into law July 3, cutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, eliminating a loan program for graduate students and much more.
Still, observers say there is reason for science and research communities to have some optimism that Republicans will step out of line on budget proposals.
“Neither bill goes to the extreme of the president’s budget,” said Debbie Altenburg, vice president of research policy and advocacy at the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. “We are pleased that both the House and the Senate have marked up bills that are above what the president called for.”
She noted that Republicans, who want the federal government to have a smaller footprint, control Congress and the White House.
“We will be lucky if we get that flat funding” that senators have proposed, she said.
The House and Senate have to agree on a dozen appropriations bills to pass the federal budget by Sept. 30 or risk a government shutdown.
“It’s a very tense political situation,” she said. “It will be hard for Congress to complete all of these bills by the end of September.”
Roger Pielke, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, noted that “this is not the first time that Congress, on science-technology policy issues, has pushed back on the Trump administration.” It happened during Trump’s first term. And, going back to the 1970s and ’80s, research and development “has been a strong bipartisan area of agreement.”
“R&D money goes all over the country,” Pielke said. “… It does kind of have a built-in support structure.”
He said the NSF, which focuses on basic research, may be more insulated from political fights than agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which deals with climate science, and the National Institutes of Health, which deals with vaccines. The congressional appropriations committees haven’t yet indicated what they plan to do with Trump’s proposed 38 percent cut to the NIH.
But, Pielke noted, “in this day and age, everything can be politicized.”
‘Scientific Supremacy’
While House Republicans appear more willing to protect spending for science than the president, Democratic members of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies subcommittee have criticized the bill. Representative Grace Meng, a New York Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said a proposed cut to the NSF and NASA “disinvests in the scientific research that drives American innovation, technological leadership and economic competitiveness.”
“As other countries are racing forward in space exploration and climate science, this bill would cause the U.S. to fall behind by cutting NASA’s science account by over $1.3 billion,” Meng said.
Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat and ranking member of the full House Appropriations Committee, said the bill “continues Republicans’ senseless attacks on America’s scientific supremacy.”
“They have fired hundreds of scientists, including scientists who monitor extreme weather and who advance our scientific goals in space,” DeLauro said, referencing the mass layoffs at federal research agencies. “Why on Earth are we forfeiting America’s scientific supremacy? What would you do differently if you were America’s adversary and wanted to undermine everything that made us a superpower?”
In the Senate, where Republicans need Democratic support to get to 60 votes to pass their bill, proposed spending cuts have been more modest.
Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, said during its July 10 meeting that the NSF and NASA appropriations bill “funds research in critical scientific and technological fields.” She said another appropriations bill “supports much-needed investments in agricultural research in animal and plant health that were requested by nearly every member in this room.”
Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat and ranking member of the Senate committee, said “these compromise bills offer a far better outcome for families back home than the alternatives of either the House or another disastrous CR [continuing resolution].”
She cautioned, though, that rescissions legislation—like the bill passed by Congress last week that claws back $9 billion in foreign aid and public broadcasting funding–could undermine consensus on a budget.
“We cannot allow bipartisan bills with partisan rescission packages,” she said, asking, “if we start passing partisan cuts to bipartisan deals, how are we ever supposed to work together?”
The increasing exposure of higher education sectors worldwide to market mechanisms (eg privatisation in and of higher education, platformisation and assetization) generates market-making pressures, technologies and relations that are changing university missions and academic practices in both research and teaching, altering not only forms of knowledge production but also academic identities (Lewis et al, 2022). These corporate, competitive systems operate in and through regimes of time acceleration and compression (Rosa & Trejo-Mathys, 2013; Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017) that enable capitalist accumulation via a proliferation of calculative practices and surveillance techniques driven by instrumental logics. In essence, the timescapes of the ‘accelerated academy’ (Vostal, 2016) have come to be not just dominated but defined by the linear rhythms of knowledge production, accumulation, consumption, and distribution.
In this context, ever-present tensions continue to pit institutional time scarcity/pressure against the often non-linear times, rhythms and practices that characterise the craft of intellectual work. These are acutely visible in doctoral education, which is considered both a liminal space-time of profound transformation for students and a rite of passage through which doctoral candidates enter the academic community.
Doctoral students in the accelerated academy experience tremendous institutional pressures to complete their research projects within tight timeframes punctuated by developmental milestones. At the same time, they are pressed to publish and participate in externally funded projects before completing their course of studies, to secure a positional advantage in a hyper-competitive, precarious job market.
Much less attention is devoted to reading as an autonomous practice in relation to educational research. Reading is generally approached instrumentally for research and mostly equated with a strategic, extractive process whereby academics retrieve, survey or review the information needed for writing to maximise efficiency and speed (Fulford & Hodgson (eds) 2016; Boulous Walker, 2017).
Doctoral students are taught to tackle the volume of readings by deploying selective, skim and speed-reading techniques that ‘teach’ them a practical method to ‘fillet’ publications (Silverman, 2010 p323) or ‘gut(ting) an article or book for the material you need’ (Thomas, 2013 p67). Without dismissing the validity of these outcome-oriented techniques, I argue that reading should be approached and investigated as research, which is to say as a philosophical orientation whose intimate relation with thinking (meditation and contemplation) and writing (as a method of inquiry) constitutes a conjuncture with transformative potential for both the reader and the text (Hoveid & Hoveid, 2013; Dakka & Wade, 2018). [RC1][FD2]
In 2024, I was awarded a BA/Leverhulme grant that allowed me to examine, in collaboration with Norwegian colleagues, the under-researched area of reading habits, rhythms and practices among doctoral students in two countries, the UK and Norway, characterised by a markedly different cultural political economy of higher education. The project set out to explore how a diverse group of doctoral students related to, made sense of, and engaged with reading as a practice, intellectually and emotionally. Through such exploration, the team intended to examine pedagogical and philosophical implications for doctoral education, supervision, and, more generally, higher education through a distinct spatiotemporal lens.
The project experimented with slow reading (Boulous Walker, 2017) as an ethico-political countermovement that invites us to dwell with the text and reflect on the transformations it can produce within the self and the educational experience tout-court. Examining the practice of reading is, therefore, vital to foster the development of the criticality and creativity that inform the students’ thinking and, ultimately, their writing, helping to create better conditions for meaningful educational engagement.
As briefly mentioned earlier, there is a dearth of literature in educational research focused explicitly and directly on reading as a research practice. Conversely, Reading Theory and Reader-Response criticism (Bennett, 1995) are well-established strands in literary studies.
Two contributions inspired the project in the cognate fields of philosophy, pedagogy, and education ethics, underpinning the theoretical and methodological framework adopted: Aldridge (2019), exploring the association between reading, higher education and educational engagement through the phenomenological literary theorisations of Rita Felski (2015) and Marielle Macé (2013). Reading here is considered as a phenomenological ‘orientation’ with ontological character: the entanglement of body, thought, and sense makes reading an ‘embodied mode of attentiveness’ with ‘rhythms of rapprochement and distancing, relaxation and suspense, movement and hesitation’ (Felski 2015, p176). Lastly, Boulous Walker (2017) introduces the concept of ‘slow reading’, or reading philosophically against the institution. This practice stands in opposition to the institutional time, efficiency, and productivity pressures that prevent the intense, contemplative attitude toward research that is typical of active educational engagement. The author calls, therefore, for slow reading, careful reading, and re-reading as antidotes against institutional contexts dominated by speed and the cult of efficiency.
Bridging cultural sociology and philosophy of education, the project combined Hermeneutic Phenomenology (Schutz, 1972; Ricoeur, 1984) and Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre, 2004) to gain insight into the lived experiences, embodied and cognitive processes of meaning-making, and spatiotemporal (rhythmic) dimensions of reading among doctoral students.
The complementarity of these frameworks enabled a richer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon from a socio-cultural and philosophical perspective. The rhythmanalytical dimension drew on the oeuvre of the French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Conceived as both a sensory method and a philosophical disposition, Rhythmanalysis (2004) foregrounds the question of the everyday and its rhythms, offering insightful takes on repetition, difference, appropriation and dwelling. Lefebvre’s analysis of the conflicting rhythms of the social and the critical moments that revive/subvert the humdrum of the quotidian pivot on the experience and resonance of bodies in space-time, their imbrication with the fabric of the social and the multiplicity of their perceptual interrelations with human and more-than-human environments. Methodologically, Rhythmanalysis enabled a closer look at the students’ reading habits, rhythms and practices in relation to their doctoral studies. The emphasis on spatio-temporality and (auto-)ethnographic observations made it possible to register and grasp the tensions that derive from clashes between meso institutional constraints and demands (eg set timeframes for completion; developmental milestones), micro individual responses and circumstances (eg different modes of study, private and/or professional commitments) and macro societal context (eg cognitive, extractive capitalism).
The phenomenological facet of the project drew on the hermeneutic, existential, and ontological dimensions found in Ricoeur’s and Schutz’s philosophy, which are concerned with grasping experiential meanings and understanding the complexity of human lifeworld. Acknowledging the entanglement of being and Dasein as an ontological standpoint, human lived experiences are situated within a contingent spatiotemporality and understood through an interpretivist epistemology founded on intersubjectivity, intentionality and hermeneutics.
This phenomenological-rhythmanalytical inquiry was therefore designed to explore students’ cognitive and affective experiences and practices of reading as they unfolded in the spaces and times of their doctoral education. The project involved two groups of doctoral candidates based in the Education department of, respectively, a teaching-intensive university in the West Midlands of England (Birmingham, UK), and a large, research-intensive university in Norway (Trondheim).
The first phase of data collection involved Focus Groups and Reflective Diaries. It foregrounded the times, places, and rhythms of reading, considering reading modalities and patterns of doctoral students in the context of institutional demands vis-à-vis personal and professional constraints. Rhythmanalysis was employed both as a method (reflective diaries) and as an interpretive, diagnostic tool to uncover and critically reflect on arrhythmias (ruptures) and/or eurythmic pockets in the reading patterns of doctoral students.
The second data collection phase relied on hermeneutic phenomenological techniques, such as Episodic Narrative Interviews (Mueller, 2019), to delve deeper into the affective, material, and cognitive experience that connects and transforms students and their readings.
The final stage of data collection involved an experiment in collective slow reading and re-reading against the institution, inspired by Boulous Walker’s philosophical reading and Felman’s description of the interpretative process as a never-ending ‘turn of the screw’ (Felman, 1977) that generates a hermeneutical spiral of subsequent, ever richer, and different textual interpretations.
Initial findings point to a complex and layered reading time experience, captured in its nuanced articulation by a rhythmic analysis of the students’ everyday practices, habits and affective responses.
Commonsensical as it may sound, reading takes time. Engaging with a text to interpret and understand it is time-consuming, and most of our respondents in this project discussed this. Reading seems to project an experience of oneself as a slow reader, followed by a feeling of guilt for ‘just’ reading.
Interestingly, clock time and phenomenological time appear to be juxtaposed in the reading process, creating conflicts and productive tensions for most of the PhD students in the project. For example, the students often welcome writing deadlines, as they create a linear rhythm that provides structure to their reading time. At the same time, the idea that reading should be done quickly and targeted to extract material for their thesis hovers over many participants, generating performance-related pressure and anxiety. Procedural aspects of reading, particularly managing volume and note-taking, are treated as a sign of success or failure, reinstating Rosa’s neoliberal equation of fast-winner, slow-loser in the accelerated, competitive academy (Rosa, Chapter 2 in Wajcman & Dodd (eds), 2017).
However, a deeper engagement with reading both opposes and coexists with this tendency, evoking the notion of Barthes’ idiorrhythmy (Dakka, 2024) to describe the process of discovering and imposing one’s own rhythm. This rhythm typically resists linearity and dominant structure, requiring slowness as a disposition or a mode of intense attention to oneself and the world through the encounter with text. Even more intriguingly, slowness as heightened focus and immersion often occurs within short and fragmented bursts of reading, strategically or opportunistically carved into the students’ everyday lives, resulting from an incessant act of negotiation over and encroachments with personal, professional, and institutional times.
The project explored, examined, and interpreted the rhythms and practices of reading in contemporary doctoral education along three axes: times (institutional, personal, inner, tempo, duration); spaces (physical, digital, mental); and affects as ways of relating (joy, guilt, anxiety, surprise, fantasy, etc). Together, these elements combine in unique and shifting configurations of dominant rhythms and idiosyncratic responses (rhuthmόs or idiorrhythmy), exposing the irreducibility of students’ experiences to harmful binaries (eg fast versus slow academia) while revealing the pedagogic affordances of a rhythmic and phenomenological analysis for contemporary universities. Spotlighting different approaches to reading, thinking, and writing enhances awareness of and attunement to developing one’s voice, listening and resisting capacity.
Fadia Dakka is an Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education at Birmingham City University. Her interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, sociology and theory of higher education. She is currently working toward theorising Rhythm as a form of ethics underpinning critical pedagogy in higher education. She recently received a BA/Leverhulme small grant (2024-25) to examine doctoral reading habits and practices in the UK and Norway.
This article was originally published on April 15, 2025, at UnHerd and is republished here with permission.
They say that where Harvard goes, others follow. For the first time in a while, supporters of free expression on American campuses should hope that’s true.
Late last week, the Ivy League university received a letter from the federal government demanding changes to its governance, leadership structure, hiring practices, and admissions processes, as well as a “discontinuation of DEI” and reform of “programs with egregious records of antisemitism or other bias.” If it failed to carry out these changes, Harvard would risk losing its government investment. In other words, “Nice school you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.”
Thankfully, Harvard pushed back. Yesterday the university’s president Alan Garber published a response, firmly committing to the preservation of academic freedom and institutional independence on campus. The government’s mandates, Garber wrote, “[threaten] our values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge. No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
In retaliation, the Trump administration moved to freeze $2.2 billion in funds to the university. That’s a high price to pay, but the costs of giving in would be far greater. For one thing, that sum is a drop in the bucket of Harvard’s $50 billion endowment. More importantly, if a school with such resources and influence doesn’t fight back against government strong-arming, it will send a chill down the spine of every other university in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Columbia, for example, recently caved to similar pressures. But in the wake of Harvard’s pushback, the New York university published a statement rejecting “heavy-handed orchestration from the government that could potentially damage our institution” and “any agreement in which the government dictates what we teach, research, or who we hire.”
This is a welcome development. How many other institutions, facing millions in contract cancellations, will stand up for themselves now that Harvard has set an example? There is good reason to push back against the excesses of DEI on campus, much of which amounts to bureaucratic ideological gatekeeping and a chilling of dissent. Combatting discrimination is also a worthy goal — but not by way of overly broad definitions of antisemitism which prohibit criticizing the state of Israel and wind up restricting campus speech.
Among other issues, the government’s provisions ignore the existing process for adjudicating alleged violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act — the federal law banning discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in federally funded programs or activities. Under these demands, Harvard’s hiring and admissions processes would be forced to employ government-approved “ideological diversity” litmus tests that would rival, if not supersede, the DEI mandates many in this administration pledged to oppose.
What’s more, the provisions are fundamentally at odds with the university’s First Amendment rights. If Harvard were to acquiesce, any free speech or academic freedom on campus would exist only according to the administration’s preferences. That is no way to facilitate the free exchange of ideas, which is at the core of any university’s mission.
The principle is clear: the government cannot condition a school’s federal funding on giving up First Amendment rights. When the Obama and Biden administrations demanded universities restrict student free speech and due process rights under Title IX — the law prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded educational programs or activities — this was clearly unlawful. The same argument applies now.
There is no doubt that higher education needs serious reform. But the solution to censorious and discriminatory policies isn’t more censorious and discriminatory policies. It certainly shouldn’t involve allowing the federal government to hold US universities hostage to its own preferences. For better or worse, other universities have long followed in Harvard’s steps. Anyone invested in the future of American higher education should hope that this fightback inspires a further wave of copycats.
Given what’s happened at Columbia University (and what is happening now at other Ivies, and beyond), every university leader in the United States ought to be planning in advance what they will do when similar pressures are brought to bear on them. Academics ought to as well; all the citizens of our republics of learning should care about their institutions and be willing to defend them.
Over a decade ago, here at the University of Virginia, we had a nasty little fight with our Board of Visitors when they tried to fire President Teresa Sullivan with little more logic or rationale than we’re currently seeing come out of Washington. (The American Association of University Professors produced a pretty good report about it, if you want to read something unsettling.)
Our opponents in that little pas de deux had a degree of ignorance that amply matched their arrogance, but we were lucky in discovering allies far beyond Charlottesville in our alumni base and other institutions.
At the time, I recognized that we had learned some smaller, tactical lessons in the whole shindig that might be relatively portable across different universities. I almost published them, but decided that it was better to let my university go forward without adding my two cents.
Now, however, in our moment, these seem relevant again. So, in the wake of Columbia’s capitulation to Trump’s assault, I dusted them off and polished them up. They didn’t need much polishing, to be honest. Consider this a small pamphlet for thinking about hosting “a little rebellion now and then” on your campus, when such is needful.
Don’t start the fight. Have a prompting event—even if you invite it merely by doing your job. We were lucky to have a “day of infamy” jump-start our events in 2012. It was dropped, gift wrapped, into our lap. We were, from the beginning, in the position of the victim—the one who was wronged. Being the aggrieved party from the start helps. A lot.
Be a big tent, but have one common aim. Because the misdeed was so expansive in its implications, the scope of our “we” was enormously wide. The “we” who was violated included not just the president, but the administration, faculty and staff—and not just them, but the students, and the alumni, and indeed the community of Charlottesville, and possibly all those interested in the future of academia in America and beyond. And anyway, you’re not seeking consensus: You’re seeking alliance. This is hard for us academics, because we are so excellent at invidious distinctions. But remember: World War II was won by an alliance of the British empire, the anticolonialist liberal United States and the definitionally revolutionary U.S.S.R. If those three states could work together, you can say something nice about professors in the business school, or vice versa. The same goes for deans and administrators: They are not the enemy. By coordinating the most expansive community as the community to whom voice could be given, we ensured not just that numbers were on our side, but that the widest set of complaints and grievances were brought to bear on the most precise targets.
Lean into shared governance. No one ever expected the UVA Faculty Senate to be consequential, least of all the Faculty Senate. It was the place where we sent junior faculty “to learn about the university”; given how much import anyone normally gives to learning about the university, that shows you what we thought of it. But, to borrow from Don Rumsfeld, you go to war with the institutions you have, not the institutions you wish you had, and now everyone knows that the Faculty Senate can matter, and matter decisively. I hope we never forget it. I hope you can learn from our example and not your own.
Tenure counts. You know that thing we say about tenure mattering for free expression and for ensuring that you can speak your mind on academic matters without getting fired by administrators who don’t like what you have to say? I used to find it annoying and silly— “of course that’s not going to happen, not today,” I thought; “no one will be so dictatorial.” Well, lookie here—I was wrong. The first and consistently most vocal group in the whole UVA fracas was the faculty. The staff members were behind us (especially the women on the university’s staff, who had felt represented by Sullivan in a powerful way), but obviously they were in the most vulnerable position. And the deans and administrators were by and large ready to accept the coup as a fait accompli. (While the deans of the various schools eventually came around, it took them some time; only after they realized that almost every last one of the faculty were extraordinarily pissed, and shopping their CVs around, did they realize that they were hurting themselves more by not saying anything than they would by saying something.)
“If a problem cannot be solved, enlarge it.” Dwight D. Eisenhower said that, and it’s true here. The prompting event of our crisis was of course the firing of our President Sullivan by our board rector, Helen Dragas, and a few others (let’s be honest about what it was and who did it). But it was clear from the beginning that there were larger issues here—about the disconnect between oversight, management and teachers and researchers, about the creeping “corporatization” of the board (though that does a terrible disservice to wise governance of corporations around the world, which would never be run the way most university boards try to run their institutions), about the failure of faculty to take seriously how the higher levels of the university were operating—matters far larger than simply this act. As the crisis developed, we realized we were reaping the consequences of structural contempt toward the faculty (and the rest of the university, really) by the Board of Visitors and a crisis of apathy about university governance on the part of the faculty. The problem may be larger than you first realize: Get it in focus, first and foremost.
“Do you expect me to talk?” “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.” The idea that disputes of these sorts are amenable most basically to conversation is mistaken. Statements were continually communicated to our Board of Visitors, but we knew almost at once that argument was not our real weapon. Once you decide to dissent, the time for talk is over, at least with opponents such as these; they will not be amenable to conversation—not without a great deal of pressure from other forces and sources. Your aim is not to convince your opponents; your aim is to beat them. To do that, you must persuade potential allies, not actual enemies. That said, it never hurts to be reasonable and produce strong arguments directed at your opponents, so long as you know those arguments are largely valuable because they are overheard by others.
At no point should you demonize or vilify your opponents. It weirdly invests them with power you need not bestow. You’re in a fight with someone who’s like a toddler—do not descend to their level. Speak calmly, as to a toddler having a temper tantrum. You won’t convince them, but you will demonstrate you are not afraid. That will upset them more. If they lose, of course they will say you did demonize and belittle them; they’ll call you “so mean,” “ungracious” and “nasty in tone.” Don’t worry; everyone else knows otherwise. Saying that may be their only consolation prize. Let them have it. You’re walking out with the Benjamins. Or, in our case, the Sullivan.
Time is not your friend, but nonetheless, boil the frog slowly. In a delicious irony, the coup at UVA was reversed “incrementally”—a bad word for Rector Dragas, a good word for President Sullivan. Resistance to the coup began with some immediate disquiet from the faculty and a few students on campus when it was first announced. But the faculty knew from the beginning they wouldn’t be the material cause of any change; they needed more powerful allies. The momentum built slowly, then snowballed at the end. And the momentum built both inside the institution and outside it: inside, mostly by growing outrage at the trickle of information released and the little bit we could discover (or, more properly, the media could discover) over time, and outside, by the gradual but eventually approaching exponential expansion of numbers and kinds of UVA stakeholders who expressed outrage.
The end of the first week saw the Faculty Senate meeting where 800 faculty and others listened as our provost, John Simon, expressed real and powerful concern, and subtle outrage, over what had happened and how it had happened. By the end of the second week, we had politicians, alumni, other university faculties—and a number of major donors—speaking out in outrage. And then, too, we began to see newspaper editorial boards—and Katie Couric—condemn the firing. Had the Board of Visitors waited a bit longer to reverse its action, no doubt the United Nations, the E.U., the Nature Conservancy, the NBA, al Qaeda and Justin Bieber would have issued statements.
The lesson here? Don’t try to get everyone on board all at once. Trust the swarm method, but go through your list of stakeholders methodically—moving from the most swayable to the least so. Rank them in their “get-ability,” and then get them, encouraging the ones you already have on your side to increase pressure on the next-most-gettable ones. On day two of a crisis, you probably won’t get The Washington Post and your institution’s major donors to sign on to calling this an outrage; but by day 10, or 14, with a little help, and momentum from other people, you may. And better still, while this is happening, your opponents probably won’t notice the pressure gradually ratcheting up, as they are simply trying to keep responding to different constituencies. By the time they realize that there are a lot of people angry at them, there’s little they can do to quell the anger, except give in.
Have a lousy enemy, and let everyone see that. Maleficence is usually associated with incompetence, and in the case of this episode, that was true. We were extraordinarily fortunate in our foe. The Kremlin-like silence of the Board of Visitors as the shock and anger mounted; the Politburo-like prose when the board decided to speak; the slow uncovering of the incredibly flimsy reasoning behind the decision, revealed in emails over the previous months; the remarkable stubbornness, coupled with utterly no sense of the appearance of absurdity regarding the irrationality of the stubbornness—it’s as if we couldn’t have had a better opponent for this fight.
But it is important that what gets publicized is your opponents’ badness, not your contempt for them. Academics are really, really skilled at expressing contempt. Few of us realize it doesn’t make us look good, either in faculty meetings or on social media. You never win an argument by judging your opponents. Instead, let your opponents be seen for who they are.
This is mostly out of your control, but it might be possible to imagine different ways of framing your opponent, so that different profiles of them emerge. In our case it was clear early on that it would be very important not to make this about the entire Board of Visitors but to focus on a small clique inside it so that pressure could be put upon the whole in such a way that some fractures would result; we hoped that such fractures, once they appeared, would quickly cause the whole to shatter. And they did: In the end Sullivan’s reinstatement was a unanimous board decision, the unanimity induced by the fact that the Dragas faction knew they had lost and quickly crumbled.
Anyway, these are some things I think we learned. Best of luck if you get in a position to need them. You’ll need all the luck you can get. We certainly did. But, you know, luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. That was on a motivational poster I saw once. Occasionally such things are useful. If you don’t know what I mean, I fear you will soon.
Charles Mathewes is a professor of religious studies at the University of Virginia.
As Subini Annamma and David Stovall write in their February piece, “Standing Up to the New Segregationists,” “When universities stay silent or indicate their willingness to comply with executive orders that seek to dehumanize anyone who is not white, male and cisgender, they are sending a message.”
We would argue that all of us in the system of higher education, on individual and collective levels, are sending messages with our action or nonaction at this moment. The past few months have been a period of chaos marked by rapid-fire executive orders, threats to college and university funding, and presidential edicts that undermine higher education’s fundamental values. The whiplash of ongoing executive actions and their judicial reversals is overwhelming, and the ground keeps shaking under our feet.
Consistent with a traumatic experience (when events occur faster than our ability to cope), some of us may be experiencing a kind of trauma response, an instinctive response to a perceived threat. Most of us have heard about fight-or-flight modes, but it seems to be fawn and freeze responses that are playing out at many institutions across the country. The fawning response in higher education manifested in the form of anticipatory compliance in the face of threats to colleges’ federal funding. Diversity, equity and inclusion offices were jettisoned within a blink of an eye.
We also are seeing some of our colleagues struggling with the task of revising position descriptions and scrubbing institutional websites, all while trying to support their colleagues who are most at risk. And there are many of us who don’t know what to do; feeling unsettled and fearful, we are just trying to make it through each day.
Despite what is happening around us, we have to continue to attend to our work—to do all of the things that keep the institution running, to be in relationship with our colleagues and to be in classroom spaces with our students. We may be asking ourselves how we can show up in a meaningful way when our world is on fire, or how we can move forward when we feel so powerless.
But if we do nothing, what does that say about our commitment to the essential promises of education—to the free exchange of ideas and academic freedom, to a belief in science and innovation, and, most especially, to our commitment to access, diversity and equity, which we know enhances the learning experience for everyone? Are these not the things that drew us to education in the first place?
This moment is calling us back to our essential purposes—the deep relationships with students, the excitement of new ideas bubbling up and the sense of freedom that comes from the creation of knowledge in the context of community. It is time for us to get to work, to reclaim our spaces, to take a stand. We cannot wait for someone else to save us: We must save ourselves. And we do so through deep relationships within the context of community. As we have learned from bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire and Kimberlé Crenshaw, relationships will be our resistance.
Relationships are not just the touchy-feely outcome of safe learning spaces: They are the foundation. And what better action can we take to protect ourselves and our communities from harm than by strengthening our foundation for this moment and what lies ahead? Fortunately for us all, whether you are an educator or institutional leader who has always prioritized relationships or one who is looking to strengthen your community as the ground beneath higher education rumbles and shakes, relatively small efforts (which is perhaps all we can muster) can reap far-reaching benefits.
There are a myriad of brilliant ways to foster belonging, structure brave dialogue spaces and listen deeply to others, indeed, many more than we could possibly incorporate here. What we offer are some practical ways to grow and maintain an ethic of care and relational accountability. We hope this inspires simple ways for you to gather with others or maybe gives you permission to explore your own ideas for slowing down to the speed of relationship-building. What we share here are not new ideas, but they may have been forgotten.
The offerings below span many cultures and have been practiced in one form or another by communities over time in response to oppressive regimes across the globe. We just have to recall the wisdom of our ancestors and employ some of their communal resistance strategies. They made sense of the world, grieved, resisted and found joy. So, too, must we.
Notice and Name It
“I believe we have a responsibility to create ways of understanding political and historical realities that will create possibilities for change. I think that this is our role, to develop ways of working through which, little by little, the oppressed can unveil their reality.” —Paulo Freire
We can’t pretend that what is happening in the world doesn’t impact us, our students or their learning. Perceived and real threats of harm impede learning and development. In noticing and naming what is happening, we give ourselves and our students a means of coming to terms with it. When we name the fears and acknowledge uncertainty, we release a bit of the tension and welcome participants in all their experiences. This could involve a facilitator-led nod to the political climate, musings from the group of what they are holding in their minds, a meditative moment or a two-minute journaling activity in which students reflect on what they need to let go of in order to be present for the work ahead in class. These techniques can be just as helpful in meetings and other convenings of staff and faculty.
In location-diverse, online environments, where you can expect a wide range of pressing matters, feel free to use or adapt this Acknowledgment Statement developed by emareena danielles and Deborah Kronenberg for a PODlive series on facilitation.
Play: A Shortcut to Joy and Laughter
Play and laughter are part of our ancestral languages, of our somatic ways of being. They exist across every culture to fuel us, nourish us and allow us to be more fully human. When was the last time you used your body or voice or language in a new way? How can you make space for a moment of play at the start of any group work or class, faculty development workshop, or community meeting? As easy as making a sound and movement, drawing with your nondominant hand, appropriating a childhood game toward a collective goal, or engaging in gibberish conversations, the small, silly risk will lead to a room (virtual or otherwise) of laughter.
The collective release of emotion through play creates a community poised to dig into the work with joy and openness and gives us a reference point of when we took a risk, went with the flow and practiced resilience. For a great resource, Moving Beyond Icebreakers by Stanley Pollack with Mary Fusoni not only has a plethora of games to try but teaches facilitators how to use the games as metaphors for the work ahead. You may also want to check out Professors at Play for a more in-depth discourse.
Tell Stories
“We tell stories because we are human. But we are also made more human because we tell stories. When we do this, we tap into an ancient power that makes us, and the world, more of who we are: a single race looking for reasons, searching for purpose, seeking to find ourselves.” —Amanda Gorman
Storytelling is a tradition that transcends cultures and communities and helps us make meaning of experiences. Nothing creates a connection between two people quite like sharing real stories from their own experiences and making meaning of the ideas together. A brief pair storytelling activity or a full Story Circle process holistically engages us all, pulling more of ourselves into the room. Stories activate our deep listening capacity, build authentic connections and remind us of why we are here in this moment, doing this work.
Gather Together
“I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning into what brings aliveness into our systems and being able to access personal, relational and communal power.” —adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism
When we are exhausted and overwhelmed, it is easy to isolate. But as the news headlines continue to keep us in a state of constant upset and tension, we can choose to pull away from our individual screens as a means of resistance, as a conscious choice to be our full selves and band together with others. Whether through synchronized movie nights, local stitching circles or open mikes, coming together builds our relationships and positively impacts our communities’ efficacy. At College Unbound, students, faculty and staff kick off our in-person classes by breaking bread together to settle into our beautiful community before the academics begin. Gather however and whenever you can and know you are generating power by doing so.
Self-Care
As facilitators of relationships, of learning, of change-makers, we also have to care for ourselves. Here, we are not talking about indulging oneself with the luxury of a spa day. We are talking about the radical practice of taking care, slowing down and saying no to productivity as an indicator of self-worth. We can also care for ourselves through connection with peers both within and outside the field of education. We can prioritize our own joy, however that comes, and know that our rest is resistance, too (check out Tricia Hersey’s work).
Resistance is needed now and mercifully comes in many forms. It might show up in marches and protests, but it can also be found in discovering what is within our locus of control and reclaiming our own agency. Our facilitation of spaces that build a sense of agency for students, staff and ourselves in solidarity can grow power.
The antidote to oppression can be found in these glimpses of liberation, in spaces where we are unafraid and can imagine a more just world. In this context, we also build up our reserves for the journey toward the future we seek to manifest.
If we can take a moment away from the chatter and from the bombardment of headlines meant to cause chaos, we can tap into our collective histories and remember: We know how to do this. Let’s recognize all the work we are already doing, the embedded relationship-building that has sustained us until now. And let’s continue to do the work that brought us to these educational spaces. The relational work we foster is the bedrock for the world we need to create together.
Sylvia C. Spears is serving as provost and Distinguished Professor of Education, Equity and Social Justice at College Unbound, a small, private degree-completion college focused on adult learners.
Deborah Kronenberg is an educator, consultant and public speaker who approaches communities of learning with creative, interdisciplinary, relationship-centric leadership in faculty and administrative roles in the greater Boston area.
