Tag: Summer

Summer Courses to Help Incoming College Students Adjust

National data suggests today’s college students are less prepared to succeed in college than previous cohorts, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic and remote instruction. Students lack academic and socio-emotional readiness, administrators say, prompting colleges to implement new interventions to get them up to speed.

For years, Mount Saint Mary’s University in California has offered a summer bridge program for students who may be less prepared to make the transition to college, such as first-generation students.

This summer, MSMU launched Summer Pathways, which is designed for all incoming students to get a head start on college. They complete two college courses for free and are able to connect with peers and explore campus before starting the term.

“We felt the earlier we can engage students, the better,” said Amanda Romero, interim assistant provost.

How it works: Summer Pathways is a six-week, credit-bearing experience that takes place in the middle of the summer, after orientation in June but before classes start in August.

During the program, students complete a Summer Pathway seminar and one additional introductory course, choosing among sociology, English and mathematics.

Students take classes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; on Tuesdays and Thursdays they participate in workshops about managing their time, dealing with impostor syndrome or maintaining well-being.

“We’ve invited the whole campus community to come in, meet with our students in person, talk about their careers, their offices, how they ended up at the Mount, what their hopes and aspirations are for the future,” said Elizabeth Sturgeon, interim assistant provost and director for Summer Pathways.

The goal is to make students aware of campus resources and connect them with faculty and staff early in their college careers.

The program also takes students on fun excursions around Los Angeles, including to the ballet, the Hollywood Bowl and the Getty Museum.

The experience is free, and students are given a $250 stipend to help pay for gas and food. They can also pay $3,000 to live in a residence hall for the six-week program if they don’t want to commute to campus each day.

A community approach: While many faculty work on eight-month contracts and have the summers off, Sturgeon and Romero said it wasn’t difficult to get professors engaged and on campus for the program.

“We had departments that had never participated in Summer Pathways before, never knew what it was about, opting in and coming down in person to present to our students,” Sturgeon said.

“It’s important for our core faculty to get in front of students, and this is a great opportunity to do just that,” Romero said.

Returning students also stepped up to serve as peer mentors for new students.

The program has paid off thus far, leaders said, with students hitting the ground running at the start of the term.

“It offers a smoother transition,” Romero said. “A lot of anxiety with starting a new place is ‘where’s this, where’s that, where do I go?’”

“They know what the resources are, they know where to park, what to order in the cafeteria,” Sturgeon said. “They have a friend group; they have that one peer mentor who’s their friend they can reach out to. From day one, in the business of being a college student, they’re an alum after six weeks.”

What’s next: In summer 2025, 66 out of 90 incoming students participated in Summer Pathways, engaging in five different courses. And 98.5 percent of them matriculated in the fall.

In the future, campus leaders hope to introduce project-based learning into the courses, interweaving the university’s mission as a Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet institution.

“We just want to make it bigger going forward, with more classes and students participating,” Sturgeon said.

The overarching dream is to get all incoming students to sign up, but administrators recognize that those who don’t live in the region may face additional barriers to engaging in in-person activities because they lack housing. Sturgeon and Romero are pushing for additional resources to offer housing and seeking solutions to address the need for additional funding and staffing.

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October 22, 2025
That Was The Quarter That Was, Summer 2025

Welcome to TWTQTW for June-September. Things were a little slow in July, but with back to school happening in most of the Northern Hemisphere sometime between last August and late September, the stories began pouring in.

You might think that “back to school” would deliver up lots of stories about enrolment trends, but you’d mostly be wrong. While few countries are as bad as Canada when it comes to up-to date enrolment data, it’s a rare country that can give you good enrolment information in September. What you tend to get are what I call “mood” pieces looking backwards and forwards on long-term trends: this is particularly true in places like South Korea, where short-term trends are not bad (international students are backfilling domestic losses nicely for the moment) but the long-term looks pretty awful. Taiwan, whose demographic crisis is well known, saw a decline of about 7% in new enrolments, but there were also some shock declines in various parts of the world: Portugal, Denmark, and – most surprisingly – Pakistan.

Another perennial back-to-school story has to do with tuition fees. Lots of stories here. Ghana announced a new “No Fees Stress” policy in which first-year students could get their fees refunded. No doubt it’s a policy which students will enjoy, but this policy seems awfully close in inspiration to New Zealand’s First Year Free policy which famously had no effect whatsoever on access. But, elsewhere, tuition policy seems to be moving in the other direction. In China, rising fees at top universities sparked fears of an access gap and, in Iran, the decision of Islamic Azad University (a sort-of private institution that educates about a quarter of all Iranian youth) to continue raising tuition (partly in response to annual inflation rates now over 40%) has led to widespread dissatisfaction. Finally, tuition rose sharply in Bulgaria after the Higher Education Act was amended to link fees to government spending (i.e. more government spending, more fees). After student protests, the government moved to cut tuition by 25% from its new level, but this still left tuition substantially above where it was the year before.

On the related issue of Student Aid, three countries stood out. The first was Kazakhstan, where the government increased domestic student grants increased by 61% but also announced a cut in the government’s famous study-abroad scheme which sends high-potential youth to highly-ranked foreign universities.

Perhaps the most stunning change occurred in Chile, where two existing student aid programs were replaced by a new system called the Fondo para la Educación Superior (FES), which is arguably unique in the world. The idea is to replace the existing system of student loans with a graduate tax: students who obtain funds through the FES will be required to pay a contribution of 10% of marginal income over about US$515/week for a period of twenty years. In substance, it is a lot like the Yale Tuition Postponement Plan, which has never been replicated at a national level because of the heavy burden placed on high income earners. A team from UCL in London analyzed the plan and suggested that it will be largely self-supporting – but only because high-earning graduates in professional fields will pay in far more than they receive, thus creating a question of potential self-selection out of the program.

In Colombia, Congress passed a law mandating ICETEX (the country’s student loan agency which mostly services students at private universities) to lower interest rates, offer generous loan forgiveness and adopt an income-contingent repayment system. However, almost simultaneously, the Government of Gustavo Petro actually raised student loan interest rates because it could no longer afford to subsidize them. This story has a ways to run, I think.

On to the world government cutbacks. In the Netherlands, given the fall of the Schoof government and the call for elections this month, universities might reasonably have expected to avoid trouble in a budget delivered by a caretaker government. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case: instead, the 2026 imposed significant new cuts on the sector. In Argentina, Congress passed a law that would see higher education spending rise to 1% of GDP (roughly double the current rate). President Milei vetoed the law, but Congress overturned President Milei’s veto. In theory, that means a huge increase in university funding. But given the increasing likelihood of a new economic collapse in Argentina, it’s anyone’s guess how fulfilling this law is going to work out.

One important debate that keeps popping up in growing higher education systems is the trade-off between quality and quantity with respect to institutions: that is, to focus money on a small number of high-quality institutions or a large number of, well, mediocre ones. Back in August, the Nigerian President, under pressure from the National Assembly to open hundreds of new universities to meet growing demand, announced a seven-year moratorium on the formation of new federal universities (I will eat several articles of clothing if there are no new federal universities before 2032). Conversely, in Peru, a rambunctious Congress passed laws to create 22 new universities in the face of Presidential reluctance to spread funds too thinly.

The newson Graduate Outcomes is not very good, particularly in Asia. In South Korea, youth employment rates are lower than they have been in a quarter-century, and the unemployment rate among bachelor’s grads is now higher than for middle-school grads. This is leading many to delay graduation. The situation in Singapore is not quite as serious but is still bad enough to make undergraduates fight for spots in elite “business cubs”. In China, the government was sufficiently worried about the employment prospects of the spring 2025 graduating class that it ordered some unprecedented measures to find them jobs, but while youth employment stayed low (that is, about 14%) at the start of the summer, the rate was back up to 19% by August. Some think these high levels of unemployment are changing Chinese society for good. Over in North America, the situation is not quite as dire, but the sudden inability of computer science graduates to find jobs seems deeply unfair to a generation that was told “just learn how to code”.

Withrespect to Research Funding and Policy, the most gobsmacking news came from Switzerland where the federal government decided to slash the budget of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) by 20%. In Australia, the group handling the Government’s Strategic Examination of Research and Development released six more “issue” papers which, amongst other things, suggested forcing institutions to choose particular areas of specialization in areas of government “priority”, a suggestion which was echoed in the UK both by the new head of UK Research and Innovation and the President of Universities UK.

But, of course, in terms of the politicization of research, very little can match the United States. In July, President Trump issued an Executive Order which explicitly handed oversight of research grants at the many agencies which fund extramural research to political appointees who would vet projects to ensure that they were in line with Trump administration priorities. Then, on the 1^st of October (technically not Q3, but it’s too big a story to omit), the White House floated the idea of a “compact” with universities, under which institutions would agree to a number of conditions including shutting down departments that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas” in return for various types of funding. Descriptions of the compact from academics ranged from “rotten” to “extortion”. At the time of writing, none of the nine institutions to which this had initially been floated had given the government an answer.

And that was the quarter that was.

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October 8, 2025
For student leaders, it’s been a Cruel Summer

From where we sit – or, more accurately when on a Cross Country train over the summer, from where we stand – there are some things coming for students that it’s possible to metaphorically see from metaphorical space.

Food price inflation will distort the “average” basket of goods for those on low incomes so significantly that a fresh cost of living crisis is obviously coming.

The failure to consult meaningfully on the hundreds of micro-decisions to be made on toilets, changing rooms and anything else currently gendered in a university has the capacity to cause chaos the very second that the EHRC publishes what we can already guess it will say on the Supreme Court ruling.

In England, the Renter’s Rights Bill will see absolute chaos once everyone realises that landlords will be evicting students on or near June 1st next year. Assessment reform in an age of AI is really moving in some parts of some universities – in others, it’s as if the OHP is still being PAT tested.

And the signals from the labour market and the surveys published over the summer hold out a real prospect that student part-time work will all but dry up in several cities in the year ahead – once that way of plugging the growing hole in the student finance system is no longer available, what exactly is the plan?

Make me feel fine

Every summer, while you’re on a beach protecting yourself with factor 50, we’re out on the rail network for three months or so meeting, briefing and training the new batch of students’ union officers who won in last Spring’s SU elections.

In part, that involves thinking through the policy headwinds and identifying the ways in which SUs and their universities have factored in their own protections for the dangers that are coming. This year the dangers feel particularly real; the scenarios particularly prescient; the forward plans systematically absent.

As part of almost every visit, we’ll explore the journeys that have led student leaders from welcome week to the un-air-conditioned seminar room of flipchart paper and post-it notes that prefaces their year in office.

And this year, not only do the dangers feel most alarming, and the mitigations most miniscule, but the experiences that have led students into leadership almost too awful to explain.

Along with everything else, this has felt like a year of extremes. Outright lies from recruitment agents. Shocking stories of disabled students having their rights crudely brushed aside. Teaching that is poor and perfunctory, supervision that is awful or absent, part-time jobs that are as exploitative as they are normalised. Tales of safety and quality in the private rented sector that are just too awful to imagine.

On one visit, we learned of rats living in a wall. On another we were told of a lecturer that “everyone knew” was a “lothario” but nobody knew how to report. International students whose visas were late, admitted weeks after the start of their course only to miss the induction, then be accused of assessment offences they didn’t know were offences, only to have their visa run out before their final work could be marked. No graduate route for them.

We’ve heard of students working below the minimum wage for weeks on end, while being bullied and harassed in the process. We’ve heard of students taking to gambling and gig work to pay fees and rent.

We’ve heard of students struggling with late and inflexible timetables, personal tutor systems that exist only on paper, late and inadequate feedback, and courses that were so stripped down and reorganised by the time they hit their third year that they were unrecognisable from that which was promised.

Fever dream high in the quiet of the night

Some of what we’ve heard will be of no surprise to regular readers. Students’ lives are now dominated by juggling – work, study, housing, travel, and survival in a way that makes “full-time” higher education feel like a misnomer. Their new leaders describe the contortions that students must go through to piece together rent payments, jobs, study hours and social life – and how universities often fail to see the whole picture.

Complaints about patchy personal tutoring, email response times, and lack of flexible timetabling all stem from the same place – a sense that systems are designed for an imagined student who doesn’t exist anymore. The result is exhaustion, anxiety, and an education experience that feels compromised rather than enriched. But they also feel like systems that neither can change nor will change as a result of their advocacy.

Cost dominates – not just for tuition, but every part of life that sits around it. Student leaders tell stories of universities insisting the cost of living crisis has passed because hardship fund applications have dipped, while on the ground students are launching swap schemes, food banks, budgeting workshops, and recipe exchanges just to survive.

International postgraduates in particular speak of being “milked” – with extortionate accommodation, opaque fees, and casual gaslighting when asking for support or flexibility. These are not isolated grumbles but systemic failures, and officers are weary of institutions that seem keener to manage perception than engage with the reality of what it takes to participate in HE.

Another set of concerns centres on space, belonging, and wellbeing. Campuses are crowded yet inaccessible – coffee queues too long, study spaces too few, and neurodivergent students locked out of the quiet they need. Student leaders are angry at the dissonance between glossy atriums and the absence of somewhere to heat up food. They’re also clear that wellbeing is not “extra” – but the way staff understand their role in relation to student mental health varies wildly, from proud detachment to amateur counselling.

Add in the “engagement collapse” – anxiety, imposter syndrome, and an erosion of confidence – and it’s no wonder that participation in both classrooms and communities feels fragile.

Student leaders want something deeper – a recognition that employability, citizenship, and belonging are not bolt-ons, but core to the experience. They want placements, volunteering and democratic activity to be credit-bearing, not just because they deserve recognition, but because participation costs time and money they don’t have. But they don’t really think they can have it.

They want universities to stop pretending belonging can be conjured through branding, and to grapple instead with consistency, delivery and equity. And they want honesty – not just reassurances that budgets are fine, but genuine partnership in facing the future. Without that, the visions of sector leaders – blueprints, reviews, strategies – risk being hollow. University survival will be pointless if students don’t.

Devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes

There’s always – especially for Jim – a touch of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Perhaps some of what’s experienced as a problem or barrier is just a rite of HE passage, a part of growing up, a component of joining a large and diverse community that involves setbacks and coping and developing resilience in the face of adversity.

But as the flipchart sheets describing the journeys are pinned to the wall mid-each morning, we have wondered whether there’s something else going on.

The year before Jim began spending his summers like this, a couple of early career social psychologists from Yale had published a paper that ended up having quite the impact on some of his psychology student colleagues in the mid 1990s.

Josta and Banajia’s “The role of stereotyping in system-justification and the production of false consciousness” doesn’t sound like the most fun a Media and Cultural Studies student can be having over a photocopier, but his accidentally interdisciplinary first-year had meant Jim was able to get into all sorts of things that were never originally on the curriculum.

The paper illustrates the idea that people, including the disadvantaged, often internalise stereotypes or explanations that legitimise their own oppression. It shows experimentally how individuals and groups can end up rationalising harmful arrangements – believing the powerful are more competent, attributing failure to themselves, or normalising unequal roles.

It has helped to shape exercise design and training approaches for new student leaders ever since. Change isn’t just about better evidence arguments or slicker campaigns – it’s about creating the conditions for awareness and solidarity, surfacing the arbitrariness of rules and hierarchies, and showing that misery is not inevitable but manufactured.

When students see that struggles with housing, finance, or assessment aren’t personal failings but systemic outcomes, the pressure to internalise blame weakens – and the potential for collective action grows.

That matters because normalisation is the enemy of change. If students “learn to love their limitations,” policymakers have little incentive to do better. The lesson has always been that sometimes the most powerful intervention isn’t a tidy solution or a polished set of recommendations, but the act of refusing to let the intolerable become invisible.

Consciousness-raising, storytelling, and solidarity are not soft tactics – they’re the preconditions for breaking the cycle of silence that otherwise guarantees next summer’s flipchart sheets look the same as this year’s.

No rules in breakable heaven

Yet this year more than most, we have at times felt like we’re swimming against a tide that is too strong to mount a defence against. Because the truth is, even though the stories are well beyond the mild irritations and petty bureaucracy of the past, they almost all sound like secrets. They are, to put it another way, below the iceberg’s surface.

Part of the problem is that the UK has an increasingly old electorate. Older voters are less likely to have direct contact with universities, less likely to hear unvarnished student stories, and more likely to see the sector through the prism of cost rather than value.

If the most shocking aspects of student life remain whispered rather than shouted, they never cut through to those who wield electoral influence – meaning the ballot box skews policy towards pensioner bus passes rather than student housing reform. The silence isn’t just cultural, it is political.

There’s the country’s economic climate – higher education is operating in a state that is literally running out of money. Public finances are squeezed, universities are struggling with deficits, and the instinct everywhere is to protect what you have rather than admit to new liabilities.

When uncomfortable truths about student experience are not voiced, it becomes easier for managers, ministers and mandarins to avert their gaze, telling themselves that problems can be absorbed rather than addressed. Silence functions as an accidental subsidy – by not surfacing the costs borne by students, the state and the sector get away with shifting more burden onto them.

Universities themselves are complicit, albeit we suspect unintentionally. A manager at any level who admits that their students are hungry, homeless, or harassed risks reputational damage, league-table drops, and hostile headlines. Better to stress resilience, opportunity, and the odd bursary scheme than to admit systemic failure.

But the reputation-management reflex actively undermines the case for investment. If every institution projects that all is broadly fine, why should Treasury officials prioritise a bailout? Silence, again, becomes a strategy – but one that entrenches scarcity rather than securing resources.

The cumulative effect is a system where student misery remains invisible to those with power, not because the evidence is lacking, but because the incentives to reveal it are weak. Students stay silent for fear of stigma, SUs temper their tone to keep the block grant flowing, universities bury problems beneath polished prospectuses, and policymakers hear only satisfaction scores.

The loop feeds itself – and in a democracy where older voters decide priorities, absence of noise is all too easily interpreted as absence of need.

Hang your head low in the glow of the vending machine

For student leaders, the pressures are especially acute. Their role is ostensibly to represent the unvarnished experiences of their peers, but they operate in an environment shaped by the logic of LinkedIn – an arena where polished professionalism is prized, and the temptation to smooth away awkward truths is ever-present.

To admit publicly that your students are hungry, unsafe, or disillusioned can feel incompatible with the personal brand of competence and leadership that young people are told they must cultivate if they want graduate opportunities. The very platforms officers use to communicate are biased towards optimism, progress, and positivity – which makes surfacing struggle feel like self-sabotage.

Even when they’ve tried, they’ve been hit by the devious frames – denialism (it is not a problem), normalisation (it is normal and expected) and victim blaming (it is a problem because of the individual mistakes), all of which become “how we operate around here” and thus hard to even start to tackle.

And that takes us right back to Jost and Banaji’s arguments about system justification and false consciousness. If social media teaches student leaders to internalise the idea that problems are personal weaknesses rather than systemic failures, their capacity to challenge those failures is blunted.

When representation becomes curation, the cycle of silence is reinforced – not because officers lack courage, but because the psychological and cultural currents around them steer towards self-preservation over truth-telling. Breaking the cycle means supporting officers to resist the currents, to value solidarity over self-presentation, and to recognise that authentic voice is more powerful than polished image.

It’s why the conspiracy of silence that surrounds the contemporary student experience is so dangerous. It erodes the sector’s long-term sustainability by masking the very crises that could galvanise public support. In an ageing nation with empty coffers, the only way to win investment is to make the case that students’ struggles are real, systemic, and intolerable – and to do so loudly.

If higher education keeps choosing discretion over disclosure, it will discover that in the competition for scarce resources, quiet constituencies get ignored first. Maybe it’s discovered it already. But it’s never too late to tell the truth.

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August 31, 2025
Trump administration to release frozen after-school, summer program funds
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Dive Brief:
- The Trump administration will now release the federal funding for after-school and summer programs that districts and states expected to begin accessing July 1 but had been frozen by the Office of Management and Budget, OMB confirmed on Friday.
- The $1.3 billion for 21st Century Community Learning Centers was under review by OMB to ensure the funding aligned with Trump administration priorities. The weekslong delay had already caused cancellations and other disruptions to summer and school-year student services, according to educators, families, education organizations and lawmakers.
- Still under OMB review is about $5.6 billion in other K-12 funds, including programs for English learners, professional development, student academic supports, migrant services and adult education. OMB did not provide a time frame for the review or release of those funds.
Dive Insight:

In an emailed statement Friday to K-12 Dive, an OMB senior administration official verified the release of the after-school and summer program money and said, “Guardrails have been put in place to ensure these funds are not used in violation of Executive Orders.” The official did not say when the funds would be released to states.

Earlier this week, OMB said its preliminary findings found the grant programs “have been grossly abused to promote a radical leftwing DEI agenda” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives — and directly violate Trump’s executive orders.

The 21st Century grant money for after-school and summer programming, and the other withheld funds, come from the federal fiscal year 2025 budget, which was approved by Congress and then signed into law by President Donald Trump in March. States and districts typically expect to access the funding in question on July 1 for the upcoming school year.

Federal Title I funds for low-income schools and districts and money for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was released on July 1 as expected.

The funding hold caused widespread concern among governors, Republican and Democratic senators, parents, education organizations and others calling for the federal government to release the money. Some 24 states filed a lawsuit against Trump, the U.S. Education Department and OMB, calling the funding freeze “contrary to law, arbitrary and capricious, and unconstitutional.”

Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, said in a Friday statement that “working parents in particular are breathing an enormous sigh of relief” with the news of the release of the summer and after-school funds.

But, she added, the funding delay “caused massive chaos and harm with summer learning programs abruptly shutting down and a large number of afterschool programs canceling plans to open in the fall.”

The uncertainty caused those programs to fall behind in hiring, outreach, contracting and other work, Grant said.

Relief at the funding release also came from David Schuler, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

However, Schuler added, “Districts should not be in this impossible position where the Administration is denying funds that had already been appropriated to our public schools, by Congress. The remaining funds must be released immediately — America’s children are counting on it.”
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July 18, 2025
a summer 2025 update (Bryan Alexander)

Greetings from early July. I’m back home in northern Virginia where the heat is blazing and the humidity sopping. Weather.com thinks it “feels like 102° F” and I agree. The cats also agree, because they retreated elegantly inside to air conditioning after a brief outside stroll.

I wrote “back home” because my wife and I spent last week celebrating our 32nd anniversary in Canada (here’s one snapshot). Afterwards I was hoping to get back into the swing of things, blogging, Substacking, vlogging various topics already under way, but things have been advancing at such a manic pace that I have to leap in in a hurry.

Case in point: after blogging about campus closures, cuts, and mergers last month more closures and cuts (albeit no mergers) have appeared in just the past few weeks. In this post you’ll see a list of these, with links to supporting news stories and official documents. Alas, this has become a tradition on this site. (From last year: March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November. From this year: February, June.) My book on peak higher education is now in the editing process; hopefully by the time it appears the topic won’t be simply historical.

Today we’ll touch on one closure, then focus on cuts, with a few reflections at the end.

1. Closing colleges and universities

In Michigan Siena Heights University (Catholic) will close after the upcoming academic year. The reasons: “the financial situation, operational challenges, and long-term sustainability,” according to the official statement. A local account concurs, “citing rising costs and stiffer competition for new students.”

The official website doesn’t reflect this on its front page.

2. Program and staffing cuts

Also in Michigan, Concordia University (Lutheran) is shutting down most of its Ann Arbor campus programs. A much smaller set of offerings is what’s next:

Starting June 2025, the private Lutheran institution will offer just nine programs — all in medical-related fields — on its physical campus. That’s down from 53 campus programs the university currently lists on its website. It will offer another seven online programs, mostly in education fields, which is down from more than 60 currently.

Also nearby, Michigan State University (public, research) announced its intention to cut faculty and staff positions this year. The drivers: inflation boosting costs, especially in health care; Trump administration research funding cuts; possible state support cuts; potential international student reduction.

Brown University (research; Rhode Island) is planning to cut an unspecified number of staff this summer. Furthermore, “[a]dditional measures include scaling back capital spending and adjusting graduate admissions levels after limiting budget growth for doctoral programs earlier this year.” The reasons here are financial, but based on the Trump administration’s cuts to federal research funding, not enrollment problems.

The Indiana Commission for Higher Education announced shutting down a huge sweep of academic programs across that state’s public universities. More than 400 degrees will end, with 75 ended outright and 333 “merged or consolidated” with other programs. The whole list is staggering. There’s a lot of detail in that Indiana plan, from defining student minima to establishing various options for campuses, appealing closures to timelines for revving up new degrees. It’s unclear how many faculty and/or staff cuts will follow.

Columbia College Chicago (private, arts focused) laid off twenty full-time professors. The school is facing enrollment declines and financial problems. Nearly all of these faculty member are – were – tenure track, which makes this another example of the queen sacrifice.

University of California-Santa Cruz (public, research) is terminating its German and Persian language programs, laying off their instructors. This sounds part of a broader effort to cut costs against a deficit, a deficit caused by “rising labor costs and constrained student enrollment growth,” according to officials.

Boston University (private, research) announced it would lay off 120 staff members as part of a budget-cutting strategy. BU will also close 120 open staff positions and “around 20 positions will undergo a change in schedule” (I’m not sure what that means – shift from full time to part?). The reasons: Trump administration cuts and uncertainty, plus the longstanding issues of “rising inflation, changing demographics, declining graduate enrollment, and the need to adapt to new technologies.”

The president of Temple University (public, research, Pennsylvania) discussed job cuts as part of a 5% budget cut. Reasons include lower enrollment which led to “a structural deficit [for which] university reserves were used to cover expenses.”

Champlain College (Vermont) is closing some low-enrolling majors. The avowed goal is to
“design a new ‘career-focused’ curriculum for the fall of 2026 ‘that is focused on and driven by employer needs and student interests.’”

The accounting program, for instance, saw its enrollment decline from 60 students in 2015 to 20 in February 2024, according to documents from the school’s Academic Affairs Committee. The law program, similarly, had little student interest, Hernandez said, and had only three students apply in the fall of 2023, while the data analytics program had only two applications.

At the same time the school is facing serious challenges. Enrollment has sunk from 4,778 students in 2016 to 3,200 last year. The college ran deficits in some reason years and a federal audit criticized the amount of debt it carries. This year “the college’s bond rating was lowered, and its outlook downgraded to ‘negative’ by S&P Global Ratings.”

Looking across the lake from Burlington, near Champlain’s campus back in 2017: a cheery image to balance sad stories.

A small but symbolic cut is under way at Albright College (private, liberal arts, Pennsylvania), whose president decided to sell their art college at auction. “It includes pieces by Karel Appel, Romare Bearden, Robert Colescott, Bridget Riley, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Jacob Lawrence, Marisol, Gordon Parks, Jesús Rafael Soto and Frederick Eversley, among others.”

Why do this? according to the administration, it was a question of relative value:

“We needed to stop the bleeding,” says James Gaddy, vice-president for administration at Albright, noting that over the past two years the college has experienced shortfalls of $20m. Calling himself and the college’s president Debra Townsley, both of whom were hired last year, “turn-around specialists”, Gaddy claimed that Albright’s 2,300-object art collection was “not core to our mission” as an educational institution and was costing the college more than the art is worth.

“The value of the artworks is not extraordinary,” he says, estimating the total value of the pieces consigned to Pook & Pook at $200,000, but claimed that the cost of maintaining the collection was high and that the cost of staffing the art gallery where the objects were displayed and (mostly) stored was “more than half a million dollars” a year.

A screenshot of some of the auction lots.

3 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

Cornell University is preparing staff cuts in the wake of Trump administration research funding reductions.

The University of Minnesota’s administration agreed to a 7.5% cut across its units, along with a tuition increase. The president cited frozen state support and rising costs.

New York University (NYU) announced a 3% budget cut. So far this is about “emphasizing cuts to such functions as travel, events, meals, and additional other-than-personal-service (OTPS) items.” NYU will keep on not hiring new administrators and is encouraging some administrators and tenured professors to retire.

Yale University paused ten ongoing construction projects because of concerns about cuts to federal monies.

Reflections

Many of these stories reflect trends I’ve been observing for a while. Declining enrollment is a major problem for most institutions. The strategy of cutting jobs to balance a budget remains one at least some leaders find useful. The humanities tend to suffer more cuts than others (scroll down the Indiana pdf for a sample). Depending on the state, state governments can increase budget problems or alter academic program offerings.

The second Trump administration’s campaign against higher education is drawing blood, as we can see from universities citing the federal research cuts in their budgets and personnel decisions. Note that this is before the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s provisions take hold, from capping student aid to increasing endowment taxes. And this is also before whatever decrease will appear with international student enrollment this fall. (Here’s my video series on Trump vs higher ed; new episode is in the pipeline.)

Note the number of elite institutions in today’s post. In the past I’ve been told that the closures, mergers, and cuts primarily hit low-ranked and marginal institutions, which was sometimes true. But now we’re seeing top tier universities enacting budget cuts, thanks to the Trump administration.

Let me close by reminding everyone that these are human stories. Program cuts hurt students’ course of student. Budget cuts impact instructors and staff of all kinds. When we see the statistics pile up we can lose sight of the personal reality. My heart goes out to everyone injured by these institutional moves.

Finally, I’d like to invite anyone with information on a college or university’s plans to close, merge, or cut to share them with me, either as comments on this post, as notes on social media, or by contacting me privately here. I write these posts based largely on public, open intelligence (news reports, investigations, roundups) but also through tips, since higher education sometimes has issues with transparency. We need better information on these events.

(thanks to Will Emerson, Karl Hakkarainen, Kristen Nyht, Cristián Opazo, Peter Shea, Jason Siko, George Station, Nancy Smyth, Ed Webb, and Andrew Zubiri for supplying links and feedback)

This article first appeared at bryanalexander.org

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July 10, 2025
5 online resources to beat the summer slide

Key points:

As the final school bells ring and students head into summer vacation, educators and parents alike are turning their attention to the phenomenon known as the summer slide–the learning loss that can occur when children take a long break from structured academic activity.

NWEA research notes that students can lose up to two months of math skills over the summer, and reading abilities can also decline, particularly for students from underserved communities.

But the summer slide isn’t inevitable. With the growing availability of engaging, high-quality online learning tools, students have more opportunities than ever to keep their skills sharp. These tools offer interactive lessons, personalized learning paths, and fun activities that reinforce what students learned during the school year–without making summer feel like school.

Here are five standout online resources designed to help K-12 students stay on track over the summer months:

1. Khan Academy: Khan Academy’s free online platform offers comprehensive lessons in math, science, history, and more. Its summer learning programs provide structured plans for students in grades K-12, including daily activities tailored by grade level. Each lesson includes short instructional videos, interactive quizzes, and mastery challenges. For students who want to get ahead or reinforce tricky concepts from the previous school year, Khan Academy is an ideal, self-paced resource.

Khan Kids, a separate app for younger learners (ages 2-8), combines educational videos, stories, and games that focus on early literacy, math, and social-emotional development.

2. PBS LearningMedia: PBS LearningMedia curates thousands of free videos, lesson plans, and interactive activities aligned to state and national standards. The content is engaging and age-appropriate, drawing from trusted PBS programs like Wild Kratts, NOVA, and Peg + Cat. During the summer, PBS typically offers special themed weeks–like “Summer of Reading” or “Science Week”–featuring playlists and activity bundles to help children stay curious and engaged.

For younger children, PBS Kids also provides games and shows that reinforce foundational skills in reading, math, and critical thinking.

3. ReadWorks: Reading skills are among the most vulnerable to decline during the summer, especially for students who do not have regular access to books or structured reading activities. ReadWorks is a nonprofit platform offering free, research-based reading comprehension materials for grades K-12. Teachers and parents can assign grade-level texts, paired with vocabulary lessons and comprehension questions. The platform also features an Article-A-Day challenge that encourages students to build background knowledge and reading stamina with just 10 minutes a day. ReadWorks is especially helpful for English Language Learners, offering audio versions and question supports to aid comprehension.

4. Prodigy: For students who struggle to stay motivated during math practice, Prodigy turns learning into a role-playing adventure game. Students solve math problems to earn rewards and level up characters, making the experience both educational and fun. Aligned with state standards and suitable for grades 1-8, Prodigy adapts to each learner’s skill level, offering targeted practice without the pressure of grades or tests. Parents can access dashboards to track progress and set goals over the summer. Prodigy also offers a version for English Language Arts, expanding the platform’s reach beyond numbers.

5. Smithsonian Learning Lab: For families looking to incorporate cross-curricular learning, the Smithsonian Learning Lab provides a treasure trove of multimedia collections that blend history, science, art, and culture. Students can explore virtual exhibits, complete inquiry-based lessons, and create their own digital portfolios. The platform is well-suited for middle and high school students, especially those interested in project-based learning and critical thinking. Whether studying the Civil Rights Movement or learning about ecosystems, students can explore real artifacts, images, and primary sources from the Smithsonian’s vast collection.

Keeping minds active and curious

Experts emphasize that summer learning doesn’t need to mirror the structure of the traditional classroom–keeping students intellectually engaged as they explore their personal interests reinforces academic skills in an low-stress environment.

Families can also incorporate daily routines that promote learning–reading together before bed, practicing math while cooking, or exploring nature to spark scientific curiosity.

As the digital learning landscape expands, there are more tools than ever to support students year-round. With just 20-30 minutes of meaningful academic engagement each day, students can maintain their momentum and return to the classroom in the fall ready to learn.

Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

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June 20, 2025
4 Creative Ways to Engage Kids in STEM Over the Summer – The 74

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The Trump administration is reshaping the pursuit of science through federal cuts to research grants and the Department of Education. This will have real consequences for students interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM learning.

One of those consequences is the elimination of learning opportunities such as robotics camps and access to advanced math courses for K-12 students.

As a result, families and caregivers are more essential than ever in supporting children’s learning.

Based on my research, I offer four ways to support children’s summer learning in ways that feel playful and engaging but still foster their interest, confidence and skills in STEM.

1. Find a problem

Look for “problems” in or around your home to engineer a solution for. Engineering a solution could include brainstorming ideas, drawing a sketch, creating a prototype or a first draft, testing and improving the prototype and communicating about the invention.

For example, one family in our research created an upside-down soap dispenser for the following problem: “the way it’s designed” − specifically, the straw − “it doesn’t even reach the bottom of the container. So there’s a lot of soap sitting at the bottom.”

To identify a problem and engage in the engineering design process, families are encouraged to use common materials. The materials may include cardboard boxes, cotton balls, construction paper, pine cones and rocks.

Our research found that when children engage in engineering in the home environment with caregivers, parents and siblings, they communicate about and apply science and math concepts that are often “hidden” in their actions.

For instance, when building a paper roller coaster for a marble, children think about how the height will affect the speed of the marble. In math, this relates to the relationship between two variables, or the idea that one thing, such as height, impacts another, the speed. In science, they are applying concepts of kinetic energy and potential energy. The higher the starting point, the more potential energy is converted into kinetic energy, which makes the marble move faster.

In addition, children are learning what it means to be an engineer through their actions and experience. Families and caregivers play a role in supporting their creative thinking and willingness to work through challenging problems.

2. Spark curiosity

Open up a space for exploration around STEM concepts driven by their interests.

Currently, my research with STEM professionals who were homeschooled talk about the power of learning sparked by curiosity.

One participant stated, “At one time, I got really into ladybugs, well Asian Beatles I guess. It was when we had like hundreds in our house. I was like, what is happening? So, I wanted to figure out like why they were there, and then the difference between ladybugs and Asian beetles because people kept saying, these aren’t actually ladybugs.”

Researchers label this serendipitous science engagement, or even spontaneous math moments. The moments lead to deep engagement and learning of STEM concepts. This may also be a chance to learn things with your child.

3. Facilitate thinking

In my research, being uncertain about STEM concepts may lead to children exploring and considering different ideas. One concept in particular − playful uncertainties − is when parents and caregivers know the answer to a child’s uncertainties but act as if they do not know.

For example, suppose your child asks, “How can we measure the distance between St. Louis, Missouri, and Nashville, Tennessee, on this map?” You might respond, “I don’t know. What do you think?” This gives children the chance to share their ideas before a parent or caregiver guides them toward a response.

4. Bring STEM to life

Turn ordinary moments into curious conversations.

“This recipe is for four people, but we have 11 people coming to dinner. What should we do?”

In a recent interview, one participant described how much they learned from listening in on financial conversations, seeing how decisions got made about money, and watching how bills were handled. They were developing financial literacy and math skills.

As they noted, “By the time I got to high school, I had a very good basis on what I’m doing and how to do it and function as a person in society.”

Globally, individuals lack financial literacy, which can lead to negative outcomes in the future when it comes to topics such as retirement planning and debt.

Why is this important?

Research shows that talking with friends and family about STEM concepts supports how children see themselves as learners and their later success in STEM fields, even if they do not pursue a career in STEM.

My research also shows how family STEM participation gives children opportunities to explore STEM ideas in ways that go beyond what they typically experience in school.

In my view, these kinds of STEM experiences don’t compete with what children learn in school − they strengthen and support it.

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

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June 15, 2025
Summer 2025 | HESA
So. This is the last blog of the academic year. Service resumes Tuesday, 2 September.

It’s been a long year. I’m pretty tired. How about you?

This was the year it all kind of came crashing down: not just here in Canda, but everywhere else too. It’s too long to go through and my more faithful readers already know the story. It’s not just in Canada. In France, Australia, and the UK, we saw institutions having similar problems: all these fantastic higher education institutions we’ve collectively built and, quite simply, nobody wants to pay for it. Not through public funds, not through private fees. Nobody wants to pay for it.

And then there’s American higher education would probably be going through something similar this year, only a greater catastrophe arrived first. I’ll pass over this in silence.

Here in Canada, the sector is increasingly friendless. Parents and students seem less convinced that universities in particular represent good value. And governments are simply indifferent, not because they dislike universities necessarily, but because they dislike or distrust the knowledge economy universities are built to serve.

Unfortunately, I think it is going to get worse. Not a single government in Canada released a budget this year which took into account the effects of US tariffs. The result? Allegedly healthy federal and provincial balance sheets are going to get pounded this year and next (and the especially unhealthy ones — BC and Quebec in particular — are going to be especially ugly). Deficits as far as they eye can see. As the saying goes, no one is coming to save us.

I have no doubt that community colleges will find ways to get through this, because they have so far through this crisis mostly shown themselves to have the ability to do what it takes to right the ship. They might not look too good after another round or two of cuts, and it’s not impossible that a few rural colleges might disappear or shrink radically because what they get from governments and domestic tuition fees just isn’t enough to properly serve their communities, but on the whole, I think they will be ok.

Universities, on the other hand. Well, that’s a different story.

About a year ago, I said that the biggest change universities were going to have to undergo in this new financial age was shifting from a belief that every problem had a revenue-side solution to one in which every problem has a cost-side solution. Institutions can no longer solve their short-term problems by just recruiting another hundred international students. They actually have to change the way they do business. They have to change processes. They have to think about production functions and work processes in a way they haven’t before. And they have to do it while trying to pivot to new missions that give them more traction with government and the public.

I am here to say that I don’t think it’s going so well.

The message that “there is no one coming to save us” has, thankfully, penetrated fairly deeply in universities. Maybe not quite everywhere (hello, VIU!), but in most places. But what I am not sure has penetrated quite so deeply is the corollary that actual change is necessary. My (admittedly limited) vantage point on the sector is that:
- I still see universities spending inordinate amounts of time trying to come up with new revenue-based solutions. It’s a habit they have a hard time kicking.
- Universities are deeply resistant to doing more than the bare minimum of restructuring to meet immediate financial needs. The idea that deep structural change might be necessary remains pretty much anathema. This bare minimum approach means that when the next round of government cuts come – due to recession, or national re-armament or whatever – they are just going to have to cut again, and again, and again. There is very little sign of anyone trying to get ahead of the curve to make both big cuts and big investments in new areas that will help them survive the turmoil.
- I still hear, distressingly often, senior people in universities utter the worst seven words in all of higher education: “we just gotta tell our story better”. Universities are reluctant to face the possibility that governments and the mass public don’t love them the way they are and that they may need to actually, you know, change.
We need to stop acting like the research university of today – which in Canada is really only a creature of the 1970s or perhaps 1960s — is eternal. Universities can die, and have done so rather frequently across history. Universities are the product of particular configurations of social and economic forces. And now, at the moment when the western world is basically re-considering the entire post-WWII order, the idea that universities are going to be uniquely immune to change is bananas. Past performance — which I think has been pretty good — is not a guarantee of future safety.

I am not saying here that universities shouldn’t fight for their own corner: they should! Often more vigorously than they currently do (see my piece on Bill 33, or on how they need to gear up for a fight with Bay Street over whether temporary residents will be international students or TFWs). But they can’t do it by digging in on the status quo.

And so, I will end the academic year by repeating something I said a few months ago. To survive this coming period, universities are going to need:
1. Ambition. Don’t waste time doing small things.
2. Experimentation. The worst possible thing right now is an addiction to “the way we’ve always done things”
3. Dissemination. No one institution got us into the mess. No one institution is going to get out of it alone, either. Institutions need to commit to sharing the results of their experimentation.
I know every university in Canada can, if it chooses, commit to those three things. I have faith. And I believe that if they do, our university sector will come out as strong or stronger than any system in the world.

But any institution that chooses not to commit to them…well, I think they are going to have some issues in the next three years. Serious ones.

It’s up to us. Rest up this summer. Re-charge. We’re all going to need it in ‘25–’26.
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June 11, 2025
Book Report Summer 2025 | HESA

Morning everyone. The days are getting long, so that means it’s getting close to the time when I need to wrap up this blog for the (northern hemisphere) summer. And that, in turn, means book report time, where I round up everything I’ve read on higher education for the past six months.

(If you’re looking for non-higher education recommendations: Terry David Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 will re-wire your thinking about what the early Stalinism actually looked like, and Ashoka Mody’s India is Broken will probably do the same for post-Independence India. Can’t give you much on the fiction side because most of what I have read is pretty meh, but if you’re into the detective genre, I can recommend Inspector Imanishi Investigates by Seicho Matsumoto. Not quite as good as his earlier Tokyo Express – which is the most brilliant novel-length thriller based on train timetables ever written – but still pretty good.)

Let’s start with institutional histories, of which I read two: A European University: The University of Helsinki 1640-2010 and A History of Temple University Japan: An Experiment in International Education. The first is an absolute doorstopper (over 800 pages – down from about 1500 in the original Finnish) but from a scholarly perspective it is genuinely top-notch. Because fundamentally it is not just a history of the university, but an intellectual history of the country as a whole. In that sense, it recalls my favourite book of last year Université de Montréal: une historie urbaine et internationale, but also to some extent Martin Friedland’s history of the University of Toronto. The Temple Japan was also pretty interesting. Branch campuses don’t often get their own histories, and this one is a doozy: a roller-coaster story which shows exactly how hard it is to lay down roots in a country where you don’t really speak the language, where government is mostly hostile, and your partners – even where they are legitimate (which not all of Temple’s were) – don’t always have similar goals in mind. Great stuff.

Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories by Hanna Holborn Grey is a good short book with a misleading title. It’s not actually about the histories of the American university, but a history of the ideas that animate them and how these ideas echo across a century or more, animated for the most part by the words of Robert Hutchins (U Chicago) and Clark Kerr (U California).

I was in Japan for a bit back in March, and so decided to pick up Shigeru Nakayama’s Science, Technology and Society in Postwar Japan. It’s at least 25 years out of date but it is a pretty interesting read as a kind of pre-history of the modern Japanese scientific enterprise and helpful to understand why university science is such a small part of the overall equation. I also read Grant Black’s Education Reform Policy at a Japanese Super Global University, a book about Tsukubu U, from Routledge. It reads like a Master’s thesis and is mostly pretty banal, but it does have just enough interesting nuggets about how top-tier institutions in Japan are re-imagining their offerings in the early twenty-first century to make it worth a skim at least.

Two books I read focusing specifically on American university finances were Let Colleges Fail: The Power of Creative Destruction in Higher Education by Richard K. Vedder and Joshua Travis Brown’s Capitalizing on College: How Higher Education Went from Mission-Driven to Margin-Obsessed. You can skip the Vedder book; over his career he has written a lot of useful stuff about college cost structures but now in his 80s this (apparently) farewell book contains far too much “colleges are woke so fuck ‘em” for my taste.  Capitalizing on College is a lot more interesting, containing as it does eight case studies of religious colleges and how the various financial strategies they have adopted to stave off financial decline have worked out. The answer – mostly pretty badly except for the one who traded God for Mammon – might not sound riveting or surprising, but the routes that each institution takes towards the bottom of the canyon are varied and collectively tell a pretty interesting story, all of which come down to “nobody really wants to pay for higher education”. Thought-provoking even if it is 50-100 pages longer than it needed to be and is too casual with use of the term “neoliberal”.

Sticking with the theme of books with lots of institutional case studies, I also polished off two books that are heavy on case studies: Inside College Mergers: Stories From the Front Lines (Mark La Brance, editor) and Strategic Mergers in Higher Education by Ricardo Azziz, Guilbert Henschke, Lloyd Jacobs and Sonita Jacobs. The former is seven first-person accounts of mergers, some of which worked and some of which didn’t (which is great because failure cases are always underexplored in the literature), while the latter is a more analytical look at university mergers over time. The latter is arguably the more significant book both because of its attempts at theory-building (its typology of mergers is particularly helpful, I think) and because in many ways its checklists of how to run a merger right are actually applicable to all universities at all times! Its inclusion of European and Canadian experiences are commendable, even if they get some of the details wrong and is awkwardly-placed in a book which is fundamentally America-focused. Two thumbs up anyway.

Tenure Tracks in European Universities, (free download at the link) is a collection of essays edited by Elias Pekkola and Taru Siekkinen. Following the introduction of global rankings, there was a widespread desire to copy this North American invention partly in order to incentivize greater productivity, but also to make researcher careers more attractive to international scholars (broadly speaking, the old European systems were nicer to early career academics and much harder on mid-career academics than the North American system).   Generally speaking, tenure never replaced the old hierarchy but rather now sits uneasily beside it, but the specific manner in which reform was implemented differed from place to place, and this book is a very helpful overview.

Two books on UK higher education to look out for. The first was The Secret Lecturer by…well, it’s a secret (the idea is a play on a series of articles and books in the Guardian called The Secret Footballer, in which a professional talked a lot about what goes on behind the scenes on a professional soccer team…the footballer was never named but most people think it was Dave Kitson). It was interesting in many ways, showing what day-to-day life in a UK university looks like, and it is in many ways very disappointing. It’s a bit blighted by the lecturer’s insistence on centering his own views about the relationship between universities and the arms trade, but that’s a minor quibble: I sure would like a Canadian equivalent. The second was Higher Imagination: A Future for Universities by British/Australian policy wonk Ant Bagshaw, which was…intriguing. Some bits of it will probably enrage a lot of faculty – in particular the bits about being relentlessly focused on programs as “products”, but the bits stressing that one of the key outputs of universities should be “joy” are pretty original (and, IMHO, true, even if it would be madness for any institution to say stuff like this out loud).

Education, Skills and Technical Change: Implications for Future US GDP Growth is a book I should have read when it came out a few years ago. It’s a series of quite technical economic papers from some of the biggest names in US economics, not about higher education itself, for the most part, but mostly about returns to skills. Of the two which are more specifically about institutional production functions, the one by Caroline Hoxby is interesting, the other one, about the rise in college costs, is garbage (as the article’s discussant in the book, Sandy Baum, ably points out). It’s one of those books where you don’t necessarily need to buy all the results, or believe that the results hold outside the United States, but you do just sort of stand slack-jawed in wonder at how many different ways they have to analyze a problem thanks to a system of economic and institutional data collection which doesn’t suck the way Canada’s does.

The Promise of Higher Education: Essays in Honour of 70 Years of the International Association of Universities: (also availableas a free download here) is a boatload of short ideas on the idea of higher education written on the occasion of the International Association of Universities. Most of the individual articles are forgettable – the way to best experience this book is as a kind of mood music in favour of higher education’s greatest kumbaya themes. But a couple are superb: in particular Simon Marginson and Lili Yang’s dissection of Chinese versus Western conceptions of institutional autonomy, as well as Pedro Teixera and Manja Klemencic’s article on the Civic Role of universities (also of interest is Daniel Levy’s screed against management-led institutional activism, which might be the politest and most substantive critique of institutional DEI approaches ever written).

The Learning-Centered University, whose author Steven Mintz I interviewed back here, is a book that was somewhat let down by poor editing. The subject is interesting and Mintz is well-informed on the subject, but while the material is good, it’s presented in a somewhat disorganized fashion, which undermines the point a bit.  Knowledge Towns: Colleges and Universities as Talent Magnets, by David Staley and Dominic Endicottis…almost interesting. That is to say: it has an interesting thesis about how cities can use educational institutions to re-define themselves, especially in periods of demographic change, but it is marred by some wishful thinking about the flexibility of institutional forms and a bunch of wishful thinking about things like “micro-colleges”. Finally, there was Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, which is probably of more interest to political scientists studying voting patterns than it is to educationists trying to work out how to de-polarize the sector in the current environment of wild right-wing vandalism.

On the subject of science more generally, I read Science of Science by Alexander Krauss (open access version available here), which is an interesting approach to the subject without being anywhere near as revolutionary as the author claims. His central insight, though – that the history of science is to a very large extent a history of methodologies and the measurement tools that permit new methodologies to sprout – is pretty interesting and I am looking forward to the companion volume coming out later this year called The Motor of Scientific Discovery. In the history of science category, I also picked up Scientific Babel: the Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English  by Michael Gordin which is about how over the course of two centuries English won out over German, French, Russian and a plethora of constructed languages like Volapuk, Esperanto and Ido (many of which, to my surprise, were actually constructed with the specific intention of being languages for the transmission of sciences) to become the lingua franca of sciences. It’s terrific and I heartily endorse it.

I think that’s it. Hope you get some good reading this summer and if you find anything you think I need to read, drop me a line!

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June 9, 2025
This Is a Summer to Organize (opinion)
We’re entering what would normally be the long-awaited reprieve of summer—a time to write, think, travel, to escape the demands of the academic year. But this will not be a normal summer.

Faculty may long for a break, but the government is actively operationalizing Project 2025, a blueprint for remaking every public institution, with higher education being the crown jewel of its antidemocratic agenda. At his 100-day rally in Michigan, Donald Trump declared, “We’ve just gotten started. You haven’t even seen anything yet.” Christopher Rufo, architect of the right-wing culture war, promises to plunge higher education still further into “an existential terror.”

We should be prepared for a potential wave of coordinated assaults on higher education this summer: reductions in Pell Grant eligibility for low-income students and slashed student loans, more dismantlement of scientific research funding, politicized accreditation crackdowns, new endowment taxes, expanded intimidation of international students and scholars, and further weaponization of Title VI and Title IX enforcement.

We recommend mobilizing on two simultaneous fronts this summer: by operationalizing mutual academic defense compacts (MADCs), and through direct activism. We must forge powerful alliances for mass protest. We suggest one often-overlooked but deeply strategic constituency— veterans.

Recent opinion polls show that most Americans oppose the Trump administration’s approach to higher education. This public sentiment gives us a crucial opening—and we must seize the momentum as we move into summer.
1. Mobilize and Form Unlikely Alliances
Faculty can take simple, student-centered actions this summer—sharing stories of student impact over social media using #DegreesForDemocracy, or highlighting the real-world outcomes of their teaching and research with #WhatWeBuild—to demonstrate the value of higher education and help galvanize public support. Op-eds and blog posts that highlight how higher ed strengthens local communities, drives economic growth and improves American public health and well-being are also powerful tools.

In addition, faculty must begin to mobilize on the streets for mass peaceful protest. This will require reaching beyond our usual circles and forming big-tent coalitions. Now is not the time for ideological purity or partisan hesitation. The threat we face at this point goes beyond conventional liberal-versus-conservative disagreement; it is an attack on democratic institutions, civil liberties and public education itself.

One particularly powerful, and perhaps surprising, potential partner in this moment is the veteran community. As a start, we urge faculty to consider aligning with veterans this Friday for the June 6 D-Day anniversary protest: Veterans Stand Against Fascism Nationwide at the National Mall, as well as at more than 100 other venues across the country. This is a great way for higher ed to show up in the lead-up to the June 14 No Kings Day protests.

Why Join With Veterans?

The shared legacy of the GI Bill links veterans and higher education. A public alliance with veterans has the potential to lend more political credibility to faculty and foster broader public empathy that will disrupt the Trump administration’s strategy of divide and conquer.

From Black WWII veterans who catalyzed the civil rights movement to anti–Vietnam War resistance, veterans have consistently served on the front lines of social change. Today, they are standing up to deep cuts to the Department of Veterans Affairs; the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and dangerous reductions to the veteran workforce—issues that mirror the assaults on higher education.

Professors and veterans are natural allies in more ways than many realize. Since the passage of the GI Bill in 1944, millions of veterans have earned college degrees and experienced upward mobility through higher education. Veterans are a protected class under antidiscrimination law and recipients of DEI programming. The veterans’ centers and services we have created to support them are now under threat from the Trump administration’s ideological dismantling of DEI. While trust in most American institutions—including higher education—has declined, polling shows that the military remains one of the few institutions still trusted by a majority of Americans. This trust is rooted in the military’s demographic breadth: Its members come from every region, ethnicity, income bracket and political background.

In contrast, higher education suffers from an image problem—often caricatured as elite, out of touch and overly partisan. Yet many of the most trusted professionals in society—nurses, teachers, first responders, small business owners and veterans themselves—were trained and mentored in our classrooms. Building visible alliances with veterans can help reshape public perceptions of academia, challenging the dominant narratives that seek to isolate and delegitimize higher education.
1. Operationalize Mutual Academic Defense Compacts
While public protest builds pressure, cross-institutional coalition building creates networks for effective resistance. Faculty and university senates across the country are approving mutual academic defense compact resolutions, which call for universities to join in shared defense of any participating institution that comes under government attack. But this is just the beginning. We need more, and these resolutions need to be operationalized through the creation of MADC task forces of administrators and faculty on as many campuses as possible. Presidents and chancellors need to endorse both the compacts and the task forces.

We must use this summer to refine model MADC resolution language to align with institutional legal and financial requirements, to prepare for the passage of resolutions and creation of MADC task forces in the early fall, and to build the infrastructure that will allow these coalitions to function as coordinated networks of protection, resistance and shared strategy.

That’s why we co-founded Stand Together for Higher Ed, a growing national movement to help faculty organize in defense of academic freedom and institutional autonomy. After beginning with a letter signed by about 5,000 professors in all 50 states calling on institutions to unite in a proactive common defense, we are now building a network of MADCs, campus task forces and shared strategies. This summer, Stand Together is offering model resolutions, organizing tools and communications support to help campuses build capacity for the fights ahead.

We’ve been struck by how many faculty members lack formal structures for self-governance on their campuses. Shared governance is a foundational pillar of academic freedom—though often overshadowed by the more visible right to pursue scholarship free from interference. We’re working with campuses to strengthen existing faculty governance organizations with the establishment of Stand Together groups, and where none exist, we’re helping to establish American Association of University Professors and other advocacy chapters to fill that crucial gap.

This summer, we must think strategically—and expansively. This summer calls for alliance building across our sister institutions of higher ed and across diverse nonacademic interest groups. The stakes are nothing less than the future of democracy.

Jennifer Lundquist is a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kathy Roberts Forde is a professor of journalism at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Together, the authors co-founded Stand Together for Higher Ed.
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June 4, 2025