Tag: Reviews

  • The Office for Students reviews TEF… again

    The Office for Students reviews TEF… again

    The Office for Students has been evaluating the last iteration of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), which happened in 2023.

    The 2023 TEF was a very different beast to previous iterations, focusing more on qualitative (submissions from providers and students) evidence and less on the quantitative experience and output measures. But to be clear, this work does not appear to assess the impact or likely effects of these changes – it treats the 2023 exercise very much as a one off event.

    We get an independent evaluation report, written by IFF research. There’s the findings of a survey of students involved in preparing the student submissions (aspects of which contribute to a student guide to evidence collection for TEF), findings from a survey of applicants (conducted with Savanta), and an analysis of the estimated costs to the sector of TEF2023. The whole package is wrapped up with a summary blog post, from OfS TEF supremo Graeme Rosenberg.

    Of all this, the blog post is the only bit that touches on what most of us probably care about – the future of the TEF, and the wider idea of the “integrated quality system”. Perhaps predictably, OfS has heard that it should

    “build on the elements of the TEF that worked well and improve on areas that worked less well for some providers.

    The top-line summary of everything else is that OfS is pleased that TEF seems to be driving change in institutions, particularly where it is driven by student perspectives. There’s less confidence that the TEF outcomes are useful for prospective students – the regulator wants to explore this as a part of a wider review of information provision. And while institutions do find TEF valuable, the cost involved in participation is considerable.

    How much does TEF cost then?

    It cost OfS £3.4m, and the mean estimate for costs to the wider sector was £9.96m. That’s about £13.4m in total but with fairly hefty error bars.

    What else could the taxpayer buy for £13.4m? There’s the much-needed Aylesbury link road, an innovation hub in Samlesbury near the new National Cyber Force headquarters (promising jobs paying upwards of £3,000 according to the headline), or enough money to keep Middlesbrough Council solvent for a while. In the higher education world, it’s equivalent to a little under 1,450 undergraduate annual tuition fees.

    The sector numbers come from a survey involving 32.3 per cent of providers (73: 52 higher education providers, 21 FE colleges) involved in the 2023 TEF conducted in September and October 2024 (so significantly after the event). It looked at both staff costs and non-staff costs (stuff like consultancy fees).

    As you’d probably expect, costs and time commitments vary widely by institution – one provider spent 30 staff days on the exercise, while for another it was 410 (the median? 91.6). Likewise, there was variation in the seniority of staff involved – one institution saw senior leaders spend a frankly astonishing 120 days on the TEF. Your median higher education provider spent an estimated £37,400 on the exercise (again, huge error bars here). It is asserted that Gold rated providers spent slightly more than Silver rated providers – the data is indicative at best, and OfS is careful not to assert causality.

    We also get information on the representations process – the mechanism by which providers could appeal their TEF rating. The sample size here is necessarily tiny: 11 higher education providers, 8 colleges – we are given a median of £1,400 for colleges and £4,400 for higher education providers.

    Was it worth it?

    The picture painted by the independent IFF evaluation is positive about the TEF’s role in driving “continuous improvement and excellence” at providers. The feeling was that it had encouraged a greater use of data and evidence in decision making – but in some cases these positive impacts were negligible given the volume of the input required. Students were also broadly positive, citing limited but positive impacts.

    The evaluation also made it clear that the TEF was burdensome – a large drain on available staff or student resource. However, it was generally felt that the TEF was “worth” the burden – and there was a broad satisfaction about the guidance and support offered by OfS during the process (although as you might expect, people generally wanted more examples of “good” submissions – and the “woolly” language around learning gain was difficult to deal with, even though the purpose was to drive autonomous reflection on measures that made sense in a provider context).

    One of the big 2023 cycle innovations was a larger role for the student submission – seen as a way to centre the student perspective within TEF assessment. This wasn’t as successful as OfS may have hoped – responses were split as to whether the process had “empowered the student voice” or not – the bigger institutions tended to see it as replicating pre-existing provider level work.

    Students themselves (not many of them, there were 20 interviews of students involved in preparing the submissions) saw this empowerment as being limited – greater student involvement in quality systems was good, but largely the kind of things that a good provider should be doing anyway.

    But the big question, the overall purpose, really needs to be whether TEF2023 raised the value of the student experience and outcomes. And the perspective on this was… mixed. Commonly TEF complemented other ongoing work in this area, making it difficult to pick out improvements that were directly linked to TEF, or even to this particular TEF. Causality – it’s difficult.

    If we are going to have a big, expensive, exercise like TEF it is important to point to tangible benefits from it. Again, evidence isn’t quite there. About half of the providers surveyed used TEF (as a process or as a set of outputs including the “medals” and the feedback) to inform decision making and planning – but there were limited examples of decisions predicated on TEF offered. And most student representatives were unable to offer evidence of any change as a result of TEF.

    Finally, I was gratified to note that coverage in “sector publications like Wonkhe” was one key way of sharing good practice around TEF submissions.

    The value to applicants

    Any attempt within the sector to provide a better experience for, or better outcomes for students is surely to be welcomed. However, for a large and spendy intervention the evidence for a direct contribution is limited. This is perhaps not surprising – there have been numerous attempts to improve student experience and outcomes even since the birth of the OfS: by the regulator itself, by other sector bodies with an interest in the student experience (the Quality Assurance Agency, Advance HE, the sector representative bodies and so forth) and autonomously by institution or parts of institutions.

    Somewhat curiously, the main evaluation document has little to say about the realisation of TEF’s other main proposed benefit – supporting applicants in choosing a provider to study at. Providers themselves are unsure of the value of TEF here (feeling that it was unlikely that applicants would understand TEF or be able to place due weight on the findings of TEF) though there is some suggestion that a “halo effect”, drawing in part from the liberal use of logos and that job lot of gold paint, could help present a positive image of the provider. It is a hell of a reach, but some noted that the fact that institutional marketing and recruitment efforts used TEF and the logos presents evidence that someone, somewhere, thinks it might work.

    The thing to do here would be to ask applicants – which OfS commissioned Savanta to do on its behalf as a separate exercise. This research was based on six focus groups covering 35 prospective students aged between 17 and 20 and applying to England. In four of these groups, participants had heard of the TEF – in two they had not – and in every case the applicants had ended up applying to silver rated universities.

    This is backed up by what initially looks like a decent survey instrument – a big (2,599 respondents, covering various existing online panels, and weighted via the use of quotas on age, gender, ethnicity and post fieldwork by provider type, mode of study, domicile, and neighbourhood participation marker) survey conducted in April and May of 2024. The headline finding here is that 41.7 per cent of applicants (n=798) had seen TEF ratings for any university they had looked at.

    Somewhat mystifyingly, the survey then focuses entirely on the experience of those 333 applicants in using the TEF information, before asking whether applicants may think TEF would be important in applying to university of the whole sample (52.2 per cent reckoned they would be important, despite a fair number of these applicants not having even noticed the ratings).

    Can I just stop here and say this is a weird methodology? I was expecting a traditional high n survey of applicants, asked to rate the importance of various factors on application choices, ideally with no prompting. This would give a clearer picture of the current value of TEF for such decisions, which is what you would expect in evaluation. That’s not to say that the focus groups or a specific awareness or use survey wouldn’t be a valid contribution to a proper mixed methods analysis – or as a means of generating a survey instrument for wider use.

    Even so, participants in the focus groups were happy to list the factors that affected their choices – these included the obvious winners like location, course content, and graduate outcomes, plus a “significant role” for the cost of living. Secondary (less important) factors included university reputation, teaching quality, and other personal preferences. Though some of these factors are covered within the TEF exercise, not one single applicant mentioned TEF results as a primary or secondary factor.

    For those that had heard of TEF it was seen as a “confirmatory tool rather than a decisive factor.” Applicants did not understand how TEF ratings were determined, the criteria used, or what the meaning of – say – gold rather than silver meant when comparing providers.

    The focus groups chucked the supplementary information (panel statements, submissions, the data dashboard) at applicants – they tended to quite like the student statements (viewing these as authentic), but saw the whole lot as lengthy, overcomplicated, and lacking in specificity.

    I enjoyed this comment on the TEF data dashboards:

    I feel like there is definitely some very useful information on this page, but it’s quite hard to figure out what any of it means.

    On the main ratings themselves, participants were clear that gold or silver probably pointed to a “high standard of education,” but the sheer breadth of the assessments and the lack of course level judgements made the awards less useful.

    There was, in other words, a demand for course specific information. Not only did applicants not mention Discover Uni (a government funded service that purports to provide course level data on student outcomes and the student experience), the report as a whole did not mention that it even existed. Oh dear.

    Unlike IFF, Savanta made some recommendations. There needs to be better promotion of the TEF to applicants, clearer ratings and rationales, and a more concise and direct presentation of additional information. Which is nice.

    What to make of it all

    Jim will be looking at the student submission aspects in more detail over on the SUs site, but even this first reading of the evaluation documents does not offer many hints on the future of the TEF. In many ways it is what you would expect, TEF has changed mainly when OfS decided it should, or when (as with the Pearce review) the hand of the regulator is forced.

    While providers are clearly making the best of TEF as a way to keep the focus on the student experience (as, to be clear, one stimulus among many), it is still difficult to see a way in which the TEF we have does anything to realise the benefits proposed way back in the 2015 Conservative manifesto – to “recognise universities offering the highest teaching quality” and to allow “potential students to make decisions informed by the career paths of past graduates.”

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  • A West Virginia HBCU reviews programs after anti-DEI order

    A West Virginia HBCU reviews programs after anti-DEI order

    West Virginia State University has been tasked with reviewing its programs and practices after the state’s governor issued an executive order against diversity, equity and inclusion. While other public institutions in the state have to do the same, West Virginia State University is in a somewhat unique position: It’s a public, historically Black institution with a predominantly white student body. The university serves all, but diversity and inclusion are part of its founding mission.

    Higher ed experts say that while few public HBCUs are openly discussing the issue, West Virginia State isn’t the only such institution that’s undergoing this kind of review process as DEI bans proliferate. Some argue that subjecting HBCUs to these reviews is counterintuitive in light of their historic mission, raising questions about how such institutions will fare in the current state and federal policy landscape.

    West Virginia State launched its review after Governor Patrick Morrisey last month banned state institutions from using “state funds, property, or resources” to “grant or support DEI staff positions, procedures or programs.” He also prohibited mandating DEI statements or any training or programming that “promotes or encourages the granting of preferences based on one person’s particular race, color, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, an advocacy organization for free speech rights, castigated the executive order as overly broad and warned it could limit what’s taught in West Virginia classrooms.

    The executive order also required “all cabinet secretaries and department heads under the authority of the Governor” to complete a report within 30 days, identifying any positions, procedures or programs based in “theories of DEI.”

    In response, West Virginia State University, along with other public universities in the state, submitted a letter outlining diversity-related positions, programs and activities, said Ericke Cage, the university’s president.

    “If there are concerns raised by the governor’s office … then we need to work to negotiate possible resolutions,” Cage said, though he expects it won’t come to that.

    In the letter, the university’s general counsel, Alice R. Faucett, argued that a comprehensive review found no evidence the university engages in or supports “preferential treatment” based on DEI principles.

    At the same time, the response readily acknowledged the university’s history and mission as an HBCU.

    “All procedural practices and programs at WVSU are designed to foster an inclusive and equitable environment,” Faucett wrote. They also “promote fairness and equal access while ensuring no group receives preferential treatment. The University remains dedicated to serving all members of the community, particularly those who have been historically marginalized, as part of its longstanding mission.”

    The letter highlighted some practices and policies that reflect the university’s “commitment to diversity, inclusion and compliance with state directives.” They included annual Title IX trainings, services for sexual assault survivors, campus presentations on human rights law and email messages recognizing Black History Month, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Women’s History Month and other observances.

    Faucett’s response also noted that the university receives some federal grants and privately funded scholarships with “DEI components,” without offering further detail.

    Felecia Commodore, an associate professor of higher education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said other public universities have taken a similar approach to DEI bans, arguing to state lawmakers that “there’s nothing to reorganize, because we’re not doing what you’re saying.”

    ‘Baked Into Who We Are’

    Though such DEI reviews might seem fraught for an HBCU, Cage believes the university is likely to come out unscathed—and it may even fare better under the governor’s scrutiny than its non-HBCU counterparts. He noted that West Virginia State doesn’t have a DEI office or specific DEI personnel, a detail also highlighted in the university’s response document.

    “When it comes to diversity and inclusiveness, that’s really baked into who we are as an institution as part of our DNA,” Cage said. “At our very core, we are all about being a highly inclusive institution where any student, regardless of their background, can come and get a good-quality education.”

    He also emphasized that WVSU’s student population is majority white. University data from fall 2024 shows white students made up about 72 percent of the roughly 3,200 enrollees, while Black students composed about 10 percent, making it hard to argue the HBCU favors one racial group over another. Nationwide, non-Black students made up 24 percent of enrollment at HBCUs in 2020, compared to 15 percent in 1976, a trend that’s sparked discussion within some of these institutions about how to preserve HBCUs’ legacy while attracting and serving an increasingly broad range of students.

    Commodore pointed out that, in fact, “HBCUs were some of the only institutions that never had race-based admissions.” HBCUs were founded after the abolition of slavery to educate Black Americans at a time when such students weren’t welcome at other higher education institutions.

    For a while, non-Black students “chose not to go to them, but [HBCUs] have been inclusive since their inception,” she said. “If the aim of these reviews of DEI is to ensure that institutions are not discriminating because of race or gender or sex, to ensure that people are not being prioritized or excluded … actually, HBCUs were the model for that.”

    Given that history, Cage theorized HBCUs may not be heavily affected by DEI bans for the same reasons he’s hopeful for his own institution: Diversity and inclusion are intrinsic to how these institutions operate, not housed in a particular office or center. At the same time, they serve all students. Non-HBCUs, on the other hand, have made changes over the years, building up supports and services for students of color, which are now at risk.

    For “predominantly white institutions [that] have not traditionally or historically had that focus on inclusivity, I think it will be a challenge,” Cage said. “It is important for institutions to be welcoming, to provide support systems for diverse students,” and DEI programs were intended to make sure students from underrepresented backgrounds “felt that they were part of the university community.”

    Some non-HBCUs in the state are scrambling to make changes to comply with the executive order. The state flagship, West Virginia University, just a few hours away from WVSU, reported in late January that it would shut down its Division of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in response to the executive order, a move the governor celebrated as a “win.”

    “This is just the beginning of our effort to root out DEI,” Morrisey said in a video announcement about the division’s demise. “That’s going to happen more and more in the weeks and months ahead.”

    Concerns Remain

    Shaun Harper, University Professor and Provost Professor of Education, Business and Public Policy at the University of Southern California and an opinion contributor to Inside Higher Ed, said it’s become “incredibly pervasive” for public HBCUs to have to conduct reviews of their DEI work as state-level DEI bans spread—even if many HBCU leaders aren’t discussing the issue publicly.

    And such reviews are extra burdensome for HBCUs, he argued.

    “If a predominantly white institution gets that same request, it’s likely a lot easier for them to list their culture centers, their Office of Multicultural Affairs, perhaps the office of the chief diversity officer,” said Harper, who also serves as USC’s Clifford and Betty Allen Chair in Urban Leadership. For HBCUs, it’s “impossible, in fact, to catalog everything that would otherwise qualify in any other context as DEI” because most have majority-Black student populations and gear their programming and services toward their student bodies.

    “It’s really onerous for presidents and their cabinet members and others on their campuses to even attempt to complete this exercise,” Harper added. “It requires enormous sums of their time.”

    Harper doesn’t believe state lawmakers are gunning for HBCUs with anti-DEI bans; it’s more likely they thought very little about how hard it would be for them to list their diversity efforts, he said. Nonetheless, the bans make some public HBCU leaders fear for their state funding if they don’t comply, or if their DEI reviews fail to appease state lawmakers when many don’t have funding to spare.

    Paulette Granberry Russell, president of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, said part of the challenge with many DEI bans is their “vagueness” and the “chaos” that can create for higher ed institutions.

    The wording of some laws and executive orders calls into question, what can an HBCU do “to acknowledge, teach, celebrate, promote, its roots?” she said. “Is celebrating a national holiday”—like Martin Luther King Jr. Day—“is that acceptable?”

    Cage said he hasn’t ruled out that some of WVSU’s programs could be at risk—including federal grants with DEI components or privately funded scholarships for students from certain racial backgrounds or geographic areas—as a result either of the governor’s executive order or President Donald Trump’s efforts to root out federal funding for DEI.

    “If those privately funded scholarships are put in jeopardy, or if federal grants are eliminated, there will be a direct impact on our ability to support our students or to advance research and innovation on our campus,” he said. “Our students come to us with a thirst for knowledge, but they also come to us with not a lot of financial resources. I can’t tell you where we would come up with the resources to fill that gap.”

    While the university is reviewing its academic programs as well, Cage said any changes to curricula or academic programming would fly in the face of the university’s accreditation standards, which require a commitment to academic freedom.

    “When it comes to academic freedom and integrity, those are things that we really need to hold the line on,” he said.

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  • Grant reviews at NSF and NIH still paused

    Grant reviews at NSF and NIH still paused

    Some of President Donald Trump’s executive orders ban funding to diversity, equity and inclusion programs or activities as well as the promotion of so-called gender ideology.

    Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

    The Trump administration on Wednesday walked back its plan to freeze trillions in federal grants and loans, though a review of thousands of federal programs continues, along with a pause on grant reviews at the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.

    A federal judge blocked the plan from taking effect Tuesday night, but the proposal, outlined in a two-page memo, raised a number of questions and concerns from higher ed leaders who warned of devastating consequences. Had the order taken effect, it could have cut off millions in federal aid to colleges, though not federal student loans or Pell Grants. Congressional Democrats and others called the decision to rescind the memo a victory but criticized the Trump administration for causing chaos and confusion.

    White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on social media that rescinding the memo was “not a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” adding that “the president’s [executive orders] on federal funding remain in full force and effect and will be rigorously implemented.”

    So, the White House is still moving forward with plans to stop funding programs that are at odds with the president’s executive orders. In the last week, President Trump has issued executive orders that banned funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and “gender ideology” as well as cracked down on illegal immigration, among other issues.

    In order to comply with those orders, the National Science Foundation halted grant reviews this week, even before the memo from the Office of Management and Budget. The National Institutes of Health also canceled meetings key to reviewing research grant applications.

    The disruption to federal research funding has set university researchers and scientists on edge, and the grant reviews are still on hold, according to numerous sources within the academic research community. On Wednesday, the National Science Foundation said its top priority was to resume funding actions.

    “We are working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders,” a statement posted online reads.

    NSF said that all grantees must comply with the orders and cease “all non-compliant grant and award activities.”

    “In particular, this may include, but is not limited to conferences, trainings, workshops, considerations for staffing and participant selection, and any other grant activity that uses or promotes the use of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) principles and frameworks or violates federal anti-discrimination laws,” the statement said. “Please work with your institutional research office to assist you in complying with the executive orders.”

    In addition to the temporary pause, the Office of Management and Budget ordered federal agencies to review more than 2,600 programs by Feb. 7 to ensure they comply with the executive orders. It’s unclear whether that deadline remains now that OMB rescinded the memo.

    At the Education Department, programs subject to review include TRIO, Pell Grants, student loans and grants for childcare on campus, as well as those that support students with disabilities and minority-serving institutions. Currently, neither the $229 million fund for Hispanic-serving institutions nor the $400 million grant program for historically Black colleges and universities is included in the review.

    As part of the review, agencies will have to answer a series of questions for each program, including whether the programs fund DEI, support “illegal aliens” or promote “gender ideology.”

    For programs that might not comply with the executive orders, OMB officials wrote in further guidance sent Tuesday that agency leaders could consult the office “to begin to unwind these objectionable policies without a pause in the payments.”

    Kathryn Palmer contributed to this report.

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  • Scientists worried after Trump halts NIH grant reviews

    Scientists worried after Trump halts NIH grant reviews

    Orders to freeze travel, meetings, communications and hiring at the National Institutes of Health—and all other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services—has some federally funded researchers on edge just days into President Donald Trump’s second term.

    Scholars say they’ve received emails canceling key meetings that determine which research projects to fund and they’re worried about how those and other disruptions could stall the billions of dollars in NIH-funded projects universities oversee.

    “I suspect that folks outside the sciences don’t understand just how disruptive even a short delay in funding decisions can be,” Adam Forte, an associate professor of geology at Louisiana State University who runs his own lab, posted on BlueSky Thursday alongside numerous other concerned scholars. “This is how we lose huge amounts of scientific capacity, scientific capacity we as a collective have already invested huge amounts of time and money in, just lighting it on fire to watch the flames.”

    If they leave, it’s not like there is much chance they’re coming back to that, or a similar position. That expertise is just gone as they are forced to move onto something else to pay the bills. A spectacular waste from a “short” delay in the machinery that funds science. 5/6

    — Adam Forte (@topoismyforte.bsky.social) 2025-01-23T12:23:24.069Z

    Some research policy experts say a pause is typical for the initial days of a new administration and that it’s too soon to tell whether this week’s order is a cause for concern. Others, however, are interpreting it as part of a larger message from Trump, who has repeatedly undermined scientific findings about COVID-19 and climate change and nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who falsely claims there are no safe or effective vaccines, to lead the HHS.

    While Kennedy, who previously vowed to enact mass layoffs at the NIH, and Trump’s other cabinet nominees await Senate confirmation, Trump has already issued a blitz of executive orders—including some that roll back diversity and environmental justice initiatives, as well as protections for federal workers and immigrants—since retaking the White House Monday. (In addition to those in HHS, all federal agencies are also under a hiring freeze.)

    “It’s not unheard-of to see some things paused when a new administration takes over, but when we look at the whole package of language and executive orders that have come out this week, they’re all tied up together,” said Jennifer Jones, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “The goal is to intimidate, chill and create this exact sort of fear.”

    A Communications Freeze

    That fear for NIH-affiliated researchers came after Dorothy Fink, acting secretary of HHS, sent a memo Tuesday to all HHS division heads, including the directors of the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration.

    “As the new administration considers its plan for managing the federal policy and public communications processes, it is important that the President’s appointees and designees have the opportunity to review and approve any regulations, guidance, documents, and other public documents and communications (including social media),” explained the memo, which instructed agency employees to refrain from numerous forms of communications, including issuing grant award announcements and public speaking, until a presidential appointee can review them. The memo is in effect until Feb. 1.

    An NIH spokesperson clarified to Inside Higher Ed via email that the restrictions apply to communication “not directly related to emergencies or critical to preserving health,” and that any “exceptions for announcements that HHS divisions believe are mission critical” will be made “on a case-by-case basis.”

    On Wednesday, Glenda Conroy, a senior travel official for NIH, emailed NIH employees notifying them that all sponsored travel for HHS employees is also suspended until further notice.

    Disruptions to Research

    As of right now, all these restrictions mean that scheduled meetings have been canceled or postponed, including NIH study sections, which convene scientific experts to decide which projects to fund.

    And university-affiliated researchers make up a sizable portion of the grant application pool. The $44 billion NIH is the largest federal research funding source for colleges and universities, which receive billions in NIH grants each year to support medical and other scientific research projects, including those that have advanced treatments for common diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s.

    Chrystal Starbird, an assistant professor of biology and a cancer researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine, had been planning for months to attend a study section next week where nearly 60 grants were set to be reviewed, but she got word a couple of days ago that it was canceled.

    “Ultimately, the NIH will continue to function, so maybe it’s not a huge issue, but for the people being reviewed now it is,” she said. “None of those grants will be reviewed on time. The question is: How are they going to get all of us together again to review the grant?”

    And rescheduling the study sections for weeks or months after the communication restrictions lift may disrupt certain ongoing projects.

    “Some people may be using this funding to do research that may have more time pressure,” Starbird said, noting that clinical research typically adheres to strict patient-monitoring timelines. “We have to acknowledge that there’s already a significant impact from this pause.”

    ‘Too Soon to Assume’ Worst-Case Scenario?

    Carrie Wolinetz, a science and health policy consultant who worked for the NIH between 2015 and 2023, said in an email that the communications freeze is similar to memos from previous transitions. Although she acknowledged that pausing study section meetings seems broader than previous transitions, it doesn’t strike her “as tremendously outside the norm of activities that might be paused while a new team is transitioning.”

    And though it’s understandable that all of these restrictions are “causing anxiety,” she said it’s “too soon to assume that worst case scenario.”

    “It becomes a concern if there is a long cessation of activity, of the sort you might experience if there was an extended government shutdown,” she said. “There is likely to be minimal impact in the short term—other than for folks who hopped on flights only to discover their meeting was cancelled, which I imagine was pretty irritating.”

    But others caution that having such restrictions in place for even a short time could force people out of their jobs, create a talent void and potentially stall innovation.

    “Even if this is short-lived bumpiness, the uncertainty in funding can have career-altering implications, especially for young scientists,” Erica Goldman, a former academic and director of policy entrepreneurship for the Federation of American Scientists, said in an email.

    “If conferences or travel are canceled, for example, the inability to present new ideas and network with senior colleagues can have cascading effects,” she continued. “I’m reminded of the experiments, data, and professionals who left the field during COVID-19. Even temporary pauses can have lasting consequences.”

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  • Late 2024 Book Reviews | HESA

    Late 2024 Book Reviews | HESA

    Morning all. You know it’s getting towards XMAS when I start writing about the higher education books I’ve read recently. So, yes, those are Christmas bells ringing you can hear as you open this email and perusing my takes on the stuff I’ve read since Canada Day (I’ve already posted my January-June takes). Hopefully you can find a stocking stuffer or two in here for your own higher education nerd.

    To start with the non-higher ed stuff. On the fiction side, I’m not having a great year. I think my favourite in the past six months have been Reputations by Juan Gabriel Vasquez (I’m a huge Vazquez fan, his The Shape of The Ruins might be my favourite Latin American novel of all time). I’ll throw in a Japanese novel, too. Not Murakami’s new The City and Its Uncertain Walls (which was better than his previous novel Killing Commendatore, but not much), but rather Asako Yuzuki’s Butter; a Novel of Food and Murder.

    On the non-fiction side, conflict of interest rules forbid me from giving too much praise to Gerald Friesen’s The Honourable John Norquay: Indigenous Premier, Canadian Statesman, a timely book on Canada’s first Métis head of government, but you should read it anyway. My favourite from the past few months was The Soviet Sixties by Robert Hornsby, which is about that regime’s one decent decade and is quite excellent. I also enjoyed Wolfgang Münchau’sKaput: the End of the German Miracle, which suggests that the real historical anomaly was Germany’s accidental “good” decade of 2005-2015, not the train wreck of 2016-onwards (and the whole time all I could think about was everyone in Canada insisting that Canada could be just like Germany if only we did more apprenticeships…if you know anyone who still things like that, this book is a good antidote).

    As for my higher education books: you’ve probably noticed my increasing tendency to turn books I have read recently into podcasts (subscribe to our YouTube channel! Never miss an episode!). Our episode about Mary C. Wright’s Centers of Teaching and Learning: the New Landscape in Higher Education ended up being our most-watched of the fall. Joseph Wycoff’s Outsourcing Student Engagement: the History of Institutional Research and the Future of Higher Education is a kind of quirky book, but is an excellent history of the most specific of higher education occupations, and the weird way in which it pre-surrendered to academic bullying to keep itself from being perceived as an alternative source of authority on academia. And finally there was Global Mega-Science by David Baker and Justin Powell which is an intriguing theory about the way that the massification of education has been a massive cross-subsidy to science.

    In the same vein, there are another two books that I don’t feel I can tell you much about because I will be speaking to the authors on the podcast in the next few weeks. There was Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom, which lays out the case for sanctions on Israeli universities. And there was The Governance of European Higher Education by Michael Shattock, Aniko Horvath, and Jürgen Enders. It’s one of a series from Shattock (who has also authored tomes on governance in British universities and on international trends in university governance), and it’s an excellent precis of how European universities in their three broad forms (Anglophone, Germanic, and Napoleonic) have moved in the last 40 years or so. Stay tuned.

    Two other fairly ancient books I have covered in the blog already were The Blight on the Ivy by Dr & Mrs. (sic) Robert Gordon (a scream, but not always of the good kind) and The University, Society and Government, which was the report of the Commission on Relations Between Universities and Governments in 1970, which for the era presented an amazingly decentralist vision of Canada (I wonder, after decades of provincial indifference to postsecondary education regulation, what the authors would say now about the prospect for provincial leadership in science and research?)

    When in Paris, I picked up a couple of books on French higher education, including Autopsie de l’Université: un regard sur l’enseignement universitaire et son évolution by Stéphane Louryan, which portrays the university (not entirely coherently) as being poised between the modern evils of “managerialism” and “wokeism” and Reconstruire l’Université by Louis Vogel, which is a long kvetch about the state of French universities and (at a very high level of abstraction) why they should be more Anglo-Saxon. A trip to the Architecture Museum in Montreal netted me a very slender book of essays by and about Arthur Erickson (architect of record for both Simon Fraser and Lethbridge) called Arthur Erickson on Learning Systems, which is mostly a bunch of ideas around how university architecture can influence the organization of knowledge at universities. It’s mostly hopium and reads a lot like some of the stuff Buckminster Fuller was writing at the time, but at least it’s interesting hopium.      

    Four the better books I read were Follow the Money: Funding Research in a Large Academic Health Center by Henry Bourne and Eric Vermillion; The Caste of Merit: Engineering Education in India by Ajantha Subramanian: Burton Clark’s 1970 book, The Distinctive College: Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore; and David Staley’s Alternative Universities: Speculative Design for Innovation in Higher Education. The first is a detailed look at how the University of California, San Francisco actually works financially (and in general a useful handbook to understand the way America funds research, in the same vein as Paula Stephan’s How Economics Shapes Science. Subramanian’s book is good on how educational attainment “merit-washes” family wealth (and should be read by anyone who is under the deeply mistaken impression that meritocracy is a particular symptom of neo-liberal late capitalism). Clark’s book is an interesting examination of the “sagas” of Antioch, Reed and Swarthmore Colleges and it’s worth reading not just because they are interesting case studies in an of themselves, but for its excellent understanding of how university cultures develop over time. Staley’s book is bog-standard futurism (a bunch of ideas for future institutional forms that are not even vaguely examined in terms of the likelihood that they would ever find public or private funding), but it’s interesting and thought-provoking bog-standard futurism.

    I also consumed HBCU: The Power of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Marybeth Gasman and Levon Esters, which managed to turn an interesting subject into something that really was kind of boring, and also Linda Tuhiwa Smith’s Decolonizing Methodology: Research and Indigenous Peoples, which I think should be more widely read not because it is a page-turner or anything, but rather to debunk certain ideas about what “decolonization” in academia means (it’s half about putting research at the service of indigenous peoples, which should be utterly incontestable, but the other half has an awful lot of French post-structuralism in it).

    A couple of other single-college histories to mention are The University of Winnipeg: A History of the Founding Colleges by A.G. Bedford and Higher Education on the Brink: Re-imagining Strategic Enrolment Management in Colleges and Universities. I know, the latter doesn’t sound like it’s an institutional story, but it’s really just the author’s experience running Pittsburgh Technical College, written in universalist language. The former is pretty stultifying, with almost as much space given up to intra-mural sports as it is with actual intellectual, and its account of the Crowe Affair, (one of the huge academic freedom cases of the 1950s is, shall we say, highly tendentious, but, well, if you want to understand about how the politics of institutional federalism and the merger of the Methodist and Presbyterian churches affected higher education in Winnipeg  (which I recognize is a fairly specific demographic) then this is your book.

    Finally, I read a load of books for a series of blogs on the history of Quebec universities I’ll be publishing early next year. There was l’Université en réseau. Les 25 ans de l’Universiteé du Quebec by LuciaFeretti (obviously this one’s a little old by now but hey! Open access!); La naissance de l’UQAM: Témoignanges, acteurs et contextes (also open access, I really like Presses de l’université du Québec) by Denise Bertrand, Robert Comeauand Pierre-Yves Paradis. Histoire de l’Université de Sherbrooke 1954-2004 by Denis Goulet tells the story of one of Canada’s more under-rated (and misunderstood) institutions. I also started (but haven’t yet completed) Jean Hamelin’s Histoire de l’Université Laval: les péripéties d’une idée, which frankly feels pretty dated, and the brand-spanking new Concordia at 50: A Collective History, edited by Monika Kin Gangon and Brandon Webb, which is more of a community history than an institutional one, an approach which has its pluses and minuses.

    But the very best higher education book I read this year was L’université de Montréal: une histoire urbaine et internationale by Daniel Poitras and Micheline Cambron. I know institutional histories aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but this book is genius. It’s not an institutional history so much as it is the political history of one of Canada’s most important community institutions as well as an intellectual history of the city of Montreal as well as a history of an evolving community of scholars (it might be the most “international” history of any Canadian institution ever written). It’s massive, beautifully illustrated, and will make you re-think what institutional histories can be.

    It’s absolutely the book of the year. Honorable mention to the novel How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto.

    Happy holiday reading.

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  • A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    by Ellen Hazelkorn, Hamish Coates, Hans de Wit & Tessa Delaquil

    Making research relevant to policy

    In recent years there has been heightened attention being given to the importance of scholarly endeavour making a real impact on and for society. Yet, despite a five-fold increase in journal articles published on higher education in the last twenty years, the OECD warns of a serious “disconnect between education policy, research and practice”.

    As higher education systems have grown and diversified, it appears with ever increasing frequency that policy is made on the slow, on the run, or not at all. Even in the most regulated systems, gone is the decades-long approach of lifetime civil servants advancing copperplate notes on papyrus through governmental machines designed to sustain flow and augment harmony. In the era of 24-hour deliberation, reporting and muddling through, it may seem that conceptually rooted analysis of policy and policymaking is on the nose or has been replaced by political expediency.

    Nothing could be further from the truth. There has never been a more important time to analyse, design, evaluate, critique, integrate, compare and innovate higher education policy. Fast policy invokes a swift need for imaginative reflection. Light policy demands counterbalancing shovel loads of intellectual backfilling. Comparative analysis is solvent for parochial policy. Policy stasis, when it stalks, must be cured by ingenious, ironic, and incisive admonition.

    Governments worldwide expect research to provide leaders and policymakers with evidence that will improve the quality of teaching and education, learning outcomes and skills development, regional innovation and knowledge diffusion, and help solve society’s problems. Yet, efforts to enhance the research-policy-practice nexus fall far short of this ambition.

    Policy influencers are more likely to be ministerial advisory boards and commissioned reports than journal articles and monographs, exactly opposite to what incentivizes academics. Rankings haven’t helped, measuring ‘impact’ in terms of discredited citation scores despite lots of research and efforts to the contrary.

    Academics continue to argue the purpose of academic research is to produce ‘pure’ fundamental research, rather than undertake public-funded research. And despite universities promoting impactful research of public value, scholars complain of many barriers to entry.

    The policy reviews solution

    Policy Reviews in Higher Education (PRiHE) aims to push out the boundaries and encourage scholars to explore a wide range of policy themes. Despite higher education sitting within a complex knowledge-research-innovation ecosystem, touching on all elements from macro-economic to foreign policy to environmental policy, our research lens and interests are far too narrow. We seem to be asking the same questions. But the policy and public lens is changing.

    Concerns are less about elites and building ‘world-class universities’ for a tiny minority, and much more about pressing social issues such as: regional disparities and ‘left-behind communities’, technical and vocational education and training, non-university pathways, skills and skills mismatch, flexible learning opportunities given new demographies, sustainable regional development, funding and efficiency, and technological capability and artificial intelligence. Of course, all of this carries implications for governance and system design, an area in which much more evidence-based research is required.

    As joint editors we are especially keen to encourage submissions which can help address such issues, and to draw on research to produce solutions rather than simply critique. We encourage potential authors to ask questions outside the box, and explore how these different issues play out in different countries, and accordingly discuss the experiences, the lessons, and the implications from which others can learn.

    Solutions for policy reviews

    Coming into its ninth year, PRiHE is platform for people in and around government to learn about the sector they govern, for professionals in the sector to keep abreast of genuinely relevant developments, and for interested people around the world to learn about what is often (including for insiders!) a genuinely opaque and complex and certainly sui generis environment.

    As our above remarks contend, the nature of contemporary higher education politics, policy and practice cannot be simplified or taken for granted. Journal topics, contributions, and interlocutors must also change and keep pace. Indeed, the very idea of an ‘academic journal’ must itself be reconsidered within a truly global and fully online education and research environment. Rightly, therefore, PRiHE keeps moving.

    With renewed vim and vigour, the Society for Research into Higher Education (SRHE) has refreshed the Editorial Office and Editorial Board, and charged PRiHE to grow even more into a world-leading journal of mark and impact. Many further improvements have been made. For instance, the Editorial Office has worked with SRHE and the publisher Taylor and Francis to make several enhancements to editorial and journal processes and content.

    We encourage people to submit research articles or proposals for an article – which will be reviewed by the Editors and feedback provided in return. We also encourage people to submit commentary and book reviews – where the authors have sought to interrogate and discuss a key issue through a policy-oriented lens. See the ‘instructions for authors’ for details.

    Read, engage, and contribute

    This second bumper 2024 issue provides six intellectual slices into ideas, data and practices relevant to higher education policy. We smartly and optimistically advise that you download and perhaps even print out all papers, power off computers and phones, and spend a few hours reading these wonderful contributions. We particularly recommend this to aspiring policy researchers, researchers and consultants in the midst of their careers, and perhaps most especially to civil servants and related experts embedded in the world of policy itself.

    SRHE and the Editorial Office are looking ahead to a vibrant and strong future period of growth for PRiHE. A raft of direct and public promotion activities are planned. PRiHE is a journal designed to make a difference to policy and practice. The most important forms of academic engagement, of course, include reading, writing and reviewing. We welcome your contribution in these and other ways to the global PRiHE community.

    This blog is based on the editorial published in Policy Reviews in Higher Education (online 16 November 2024) A new mission for higher education policy reviews

    Professor Ellen Hazelkorn is Joint Managing Partner, BH Associates. She is Professor Emeritus, Technological University Dublin.

    Hamish Coates is professor of public policy, director of the Higher Education Futures Lab, and global tertiary education expert.

    Hans de Wit is Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education, Senior Fellow of the international Association of Universities.

    Tessa DeLaquil is postdoctoral research fellow at the School of Education at University College Dublin.

    Author: SRHE News Blog

    An international learned society, concerned with supporting research and researchers into Higher Education

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