Scheduled for Feb 20, 2025. The Spring 2024 Inclusive Growth and Racial Equity Thought Leadership Lecture Series will feature a fireside chat with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, Director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research, and National Book Award-winning Author.
TSU’s financial troubles are steep and immediate. An FAQ page on the university’s website acknowledges that the financial condition has reached crisis levels stemming from missed enrollment targets and operating deficits. This fall, the university posted a projected deficit of $46 million by the end of the fiscal year.
The university identified inefficient processes in financial aid, advising and enrollment systems, that contributed to its woes. It also said those problems were exacerbated by 2024’s messy federal rollout of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.
Additionally, and perhaps most damaging, the university launched a full scholarship program for some students without a plan to fund it throughout students’ journey to graduation. It paid $37 million toward the scholarship in fiscal 2022 using federal pandemic emergency funds. When that money ran dry, TSU had to issue tens of millions of dollars in institutional financial aid, causing it to heavily discount its tuition.
The scholarship helped attract students, with fall enrollment hitting 8,198 students in 2023, compared to 7,774 in 2018. But the university couldn’t ultimately afford to maintain those aid levels.
Taking aim at the university’s management, Tennessee lawmakers last March passed a Republican-led bill to replace all of the university’s trustees and restructure its board, over the objection of Democrats.
Emergency state funding last fall kept the institution operating, but Tucker said TSU will need more to not just turn around — but to stay open.
“It’s a fact that we can’t pay our bills,” Tucker said, noting also that the university would likely not be open today without state help.
But Tennessee also owes TSU money, according to a federal assessment.
In a letter to Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee in 2023, then-U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the institution had been hurt by “longstanding and ongoing underinvestment” as a public land-grant HBCU. By their estimate, inequitable funding gaps led Tennessee State to miss out on $2.1 billion over 30 years.
Tucker dismissed the idea of suing the state for the $2.1 billion, arguing that the legal process could take years — while the university’s financial needs are immediate. Legal action could also potentially anger the legislators whose support TSU needs to help provide funding. Moreover, the institution could lose a legal challenge, he added.
Tucker — the university’s second interim president in less than a year — argued for focusing instead on the state funding gap identified by the Legislature in 2021. That gap amounts to over $540 million.
Since identifying the amount, Tennessee lawmakers lined up a one-time $250 million sum for the university to invest in infrastructure. Tucker said the university could use a portion of those funds to keep it afloat through the first year of a five-year plan.
Along with state help, TSU and its board are considering financial exigency, a restructuring process that allows an institution experiencing budgetary distress to lay off tenured faculty and shut down academic programs.
In a special meeting of TSU’s board on Jan. 31, a consultant with the National Association of College and University Business Officers presented a detailed workshop on how exigency works.
Tucker said Tuesday that officials were considering exigency but that it wasn’t in the university’s immediate plans.
HESA Spring 2025 kicks off in earnest with a full release of the staff data for 2023-24.
Unlike in previous years, there’s been no early release of the headlines – the statistics release (which provides an overview at sector level) and the full data release (which offers detail at provider level) have both turned up on the same day.
Staff data has, in previous years, generally been less volatile than student data. Whereas recruitment can and does lurch alarmingly around based on strategic priorities, government vacillation about student visas, and the vagaries of the student market – staff employment tends to be something with a merciful degree of permanency. Even if it isn’t the same staff working under the same terms and conditions, it does tend to need broadly the same number of people.
With the increasing financial pressures felt by universities you would expect 2023-24 to be a deviation from this norm.
We’ll start by looking at the numbers of starters and leavers from each provider. This chart shows the change in academic staff numbers year on year between your chosen year and the year before (as the thick bars) and the total number of full and part time staff in the year of your choice (as the thin bars). Over on the other side of the visualisation under the controls you can see total staff numbers, broken down into full and part time as a time series – mouse over a provider on the main chart to change the provider focus here. You can filter by year, and (for the main chart) mode of employment.
What’s apparent is that across quite a lot of the sector academic staff numbers didn’t change that much. There were some outliers at both end – Coventry University had 585 less academic staff in 2023-24 than 2022-23, while Cardiff University has 565 more (yes, the same Cardiff University that confirmed plans for 400 full time redundancies yesterday).
If you’ve been following sector news this may surprise you – last year saw many providers announce voluntary or compulsory redundancies. The Queen Mary University of London UCU branch has been tracking these announcements over time.
Schemes like this take time for a university to run – there is a mandatory consultation period, followed (hopefully) by some finessing of the scheme and then negotiations with individual staff members. It is not a way to make a quick, in year, saving. Oftentimes the original announcement is of a far higher number of staff redundancies than actually end up happening.
If you work in a university or other higher education provider, you’ll know that stuff like this very often happens across particular departments and faculties rather than the whole university. I can’t offer you faculty level from public data, but there is data available by cost centre.
Cost centres are usually used in financial data, and do not cleanly map to visible structures within universities. Here you can select a provider and choose between cost centre groups and cost centres as two levels of detail. I’ve added an option to select contract type – in the main I suggest you leave this as academic (excluding atypical).
I’m sure I say this every year, but not all providers return data for non-academic staff (in England they are not required to), and an “atypical” contract usually refers to a very short period of work (a single guest lecture or suchlike). There is a pervasive myth that these are “zero hours” contracts – even though HESA publishes data on these separately:
Here’s a chart showing the terms of employment and pay arrangements related to zero hours contracts for 2023-24. You can see the majority of these are academic in nature, with a roughly even split between fixed term and open-ended terms. The majority (around 4,075) are paid by the hour.
This represents a small year-on-year growth in the use of this kind of contract – in 2022-23, there were 3,915 academic staff on a zero hour contract
I often wonder about the conditions of academic staff across subject areas, and how this pertains to the age of the academics involved and how much they are paid. This visualisation allows use to view age against salary (relating to groups of spine points on the standard New JNCHES pay scale used in most larger providers).
As you’d expect, overall there is a positive correlation between age and salary – if you are an older academic you are likely to be paid more. This is particularly pronounced in design, creative, and performing arts: where staff are likely to be older and better paid on average. Compare the physical sciences, where more staff are younger and spine points are lower.
This chart allows you to select a cost centre (either a group or individual cost centre), and filter by academic employment function (teaching, research, both…) and contract level (senior academics and professors, others…). There’s a range of years on offer as well.
The main news stories that tend to come out of this release relate to academic staff characteristics, and specifically the low number of Black professors. There is some positive movement on that front this year, though the sector at that level is in no way representative of staff as a whole, the student body, or wider society.
Johns Hopkins University Press/MIT Press/University Press of Kentucky/Duke University Press/Princeton University Press/University of Minnesota Press/University of California Press
More catalogs from university presses started arriving almost immediately after the last roundup of spring titles appeared—and in going through them, a couple of topical clusters of books struck me as notable. Here is a quick overview. Quoted passages come from material provided by the publishers.
What do ant colonies, online subcultures, the publishing industry and the device you are using to read this all have in common? Each is, in some sense, a network embedded in still wider networks. They, like myriad other phenomena, can be depicted in geometric diagrams in which the components of a system (“vertices”) are connected by lines (“edges”) representing interactions or relationships.
Researchers across many disciplines understand how systems and processes can be conceptualized as networks. The lay public, on the whole, does not. Anthony Bonato’s Dots and Lines: Hidden Networks in Social Media, AI, and Nature (Hopkins University Press, May) aims to bring nonspecialist readers up to speed on elements of the network perspective. Everything from “Bitcoin transactions to neural connections” and “political landscapes to climate patterns” can be mapped via dots and lines. The author’s use of demotic labels seems well-advised, given that “Vertices and Edges” seems much less commercially viable as a title.
Some networks make it a priority to remain diagrammable, of course. Isak Ladegaard’s Open Secrecy: How Technology Empowers the Digital Underworld (University of California Press, May) looks into the “military-grade encryption, rerouting software, and cryptocurrencies” enabling “shadowy groups to organize collective action.” Examples include dark-web markets for illegal drugs, the activities of online hate groups and the efforts of Chinese citizens to remain connected to parts of the internet blocked by the Great Firewall. In each case, those running stealth networks “move through cyberspace like digital nomads, often with law enforcement and other powerful actors on their tails.”
Leif Weatherby’s Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (University of Minnesota Press, June) offers “a new theory of meaning in language and computation” applicable to the production of texts by artificial intelligence based on large language models.
Generative AI “does not simulate cognition, as widely believed,” he argues, “but rather creates culture” instead of just shuffling together fragments of it. (This is perhaps as good an occasion as any to issue my prediction that 2025 will see the first best-selling novel written by an AI algorithm.)
On an altogether more dire note, Daniel Oberhaus’s The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum (MIT Press, February) warns that the use of AI in psychiatry has shown “vanishingly little evidence” of improving patient outcomes. The problem is not one of engineering but of programming: The algorithms incorporate “deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale,” posing “significant risks to vulnerable people.”
In old-school psychodynamic therapy, what’s said during the consultation does not leave the room. The author warns that a “psychiatric surveillance economy” is emerging, one “in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms.”
Doubling down on a strictly defined and vigilantly enforced understanding of sex and gender as binary is high on the MAGA cultural agenda. A few books out this spring insist on the ambiguities and complexities, even so.
Agustín Fuentes offers perhaps the most basic challenge to traditional assumptions with Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary (Princeton University Press, May). Arguing on the basis of recent scientific research, the book “explain[s] why the binary view of the sexes is fundamentally flawed,” with “compelling evidence from the fossil and archaeological record that attests to the diversity of our ancestors’ sexual bonds, gender roles, and family and community structures.”
The ability to survive and thrive in unwelcoming circumstances is a focus of the writings collected in To Belong Here: A New Generation of Queer, Trans, and Two-Spirit Appalachian Writers (University Press of Kentucky, April), edited by Rae Garringer. The term “two-spirit” refers to a nonbinary gender category recognized among some Indigenous peoples in North America. Contributors discuss “themes of erasure, environmentalism, violence, kinship, racism, Indigeneity, queer love, and trans liberation” in Appalachia, exploring “the writers’ resilience in reconciling their complex and often contradictory connections to home.”
Transgender philosophy is covered at some length in an entry recently added to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Talia Mae Bettcher, whose work figures prominently in the entry’s bibliography, continues her work in the field with Beyond Personhood (University of Minnesota Press, March), presenting “a theory of intimacy and distance” that proposes “an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity.”
Engineering and programming enter transgender studies’ already interdisciplinary ambit with Oliver L. Haimson’s Trans Technologies (MIT Press, February), which draws on the author’s “in-depth interviews with more than 100 creators of technology” for trans people, showing “how trans people often must rely on community, technology, and the combination of the two to meet their basic needs and challenges.” From the book’s description and the author’s published articles, it seems that the technology in question tends to be digital: social networks, games, extended reality systems (akin to virtual reality but with additional capacities). The book also considers the factors shaping, and in some cases restricting, innovation in trans tech.
To close this list, there’s The Dream of a Common Movement (Duke University Press, April), a collection of writings by and interviews with Urvashi Vaid (1958–2022) edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman. Urvashi Vaid was a feminist and a civil rights advocate whose work “over the course of four decades fundamentally shaped the LGBTQ movement.” Her perspective that “the goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation” seems compatible with an older principle, which holds that an injury to one is an injury to all.