Tag: told

College students are tired of being told that we ‘should be grateful’ for our internships. We also want to get paid

by Savannah Celeste Scott, The Hechinger Report
November 17, 2025

Imagine clocking out of an eight-hour shift and your compensation is a pat on the back and experience for your resume.

This scenario is a disturbing reality for around one million college students , and it needs to stop. Students work countless hours on top of their academic pursuits only to be told they should be “grateful for the opportunity.”

The government must pass legislation mandating that all internships include monetary compensation; employers must stop exploiting students and recent graduates while they build necessary work experience.

The idea of an unpaid internship is odd considering that most of us grew up learning that work is rewarded. Some 71 percent of American households give children ages 5 to 17 an allowance for doing their chores, a Wells Fargo study found.

Practices like that have led many of us to believe that labor should be paid, and it should be no different when we enter the job market.

Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

There is a disturbing correlation between unpaid internships and exploitation, especially for people from marginalized communities. Historically, Black people have been the face of working without compensation — a phenomenon dating back to early American slave practices.

Unpaid work is not just exploitation — it is dehumanizing. No person can survive without money, so no one should be required to work with no compensation to help them live. The reality is that, unlike higher-income students, low-income students cannot afford to work for free. They need money to cover their tuition, afford groceries and pay for a place to live. This is why unpaid internships further the cycle of economic exploitation, the student-run Columbia Spectator noted.

Yet there are plenty of people who believe compensation does not always have to be monetary. Many students have heard employers extol the value of “experience” as they try to persuade them to work without pay.

Such was the case for me when I was hired for a legal internship as a freshman in college. I thoroughly enjoyed my internship, as it gave me both professional and social opportunities. But it was an extremely difficult time for me both mentally and financially.

I was taking 16 credit hours, regularly writing for a student publication and working another part-time job to save money for law school. The stress of going into the office every day to handle casework — often ranging from domestic violence to sexual assault cases — was mentally taxing when combined with schoolwork and extracurricular responsibilities.

While the experience that the internship provided was incredible, monetary compensation would have made it much less stressful, as I would not have needed the other job.

Unpaid internships can also hurt graduates’ prospects in the job market. Those who have had unpaid internships receive fewer job offers on average than those who completed paid internships, statistics from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) show.

The average student who completed an unpaid internship also saw $22,500 less in their starting salaries than those who completed paid internships. According to the Delta Institute, “employers offering compensation tend to invest more in mentoring, performance feedback, and skill-building”; that added investment provides students with more preparation for the job market and helps them look more impressive to an employer.

Related: Looking for internships? They are in short supply

Unpaid interns have been fighting for compensation for decades. A lawsuit filed by two interns against Fox Searchlight over their lack of compensation when working on the movie “Black Swan” resulted in a legal battle that lasted five years. The two interns were finally compensated a total of $13,500 for their work — despite the film grossing more than $300 million.

The Fox Searchlight lawsuit sparked a wave of other impassioned interns to plead their cases as well, including a class-action lawsuit against NBCUniversal back in July 2013. That resulted in a $6.4 million settlement split among thousands of interns.

In both cases, the employers made millions of dollars in profits but still refused to pay their interns until they were legally forced to do so.

According to Shawn VanDerziel, the president and chief executive officer of NACE, paid internships are a “game changer” to employers and employees alike. The dilemma is this: Employers want labor, and students want internships. The most obvious solution would be to pay students for the work that they do.

Students do not work for fun. They work because they want to create better futures for themselves; their success will be less likely if they don’t receive monetary compensation. The government needs to make it illegal for employers to exploit students by having them work without pay.

College students should not be expected to work for free.

Savannah Celeste Scott is a senior at the University of Georgia in Athens, studying journalism, Spanish and law, jurisprudence and the state on a pre-law track.

Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

This story about unpaid internships was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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November 17, 2025
What the white paper told us about the Government’s future plans for R&D

Author:

Dr Hollie Chandler

Published:

30 October 2025

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Hollie Chandler, Director of Policy at the Russell Group. It is the third blog in HEPI’s series responding to the post-16 education and skills white paper. You can find the first blog here, and the second blog here.

When the white paper finally arrived, much of it confirmed the speculation that’s been rife all summer. Namely, that the Government wants a more joined-up skills sector where universities and FE collaborate more, offer a clearer set of pathways for post-16 choices, and widening opportunity for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. There was also a strong focus on quality, presented as a deal for the increase in tuition fees – a step towards financial sustainability that will be significantly undermined by the international levy.

But alongside the paper’s focus on further education and vocational qualifications – most prominently the newly-announced V-levels – there was plenty of recognition for postgraduate skills and the UK’s world-leading research base.

This was a welcome moment of focus for the postgraduate research community. These students are the lifeblood of our research and development ecosystem, but the number of new researchers starting a postgraduate qualification is in decline – decreasing by 10.4% between 2018/19 and 2023/24. If the UK is to become a true world leader in high-growth R&D sectors, then this is a real concern. The government’s own labour market projections show demand for workers educated beyond graduate level will grow 53% by 2035: the biggest increase for any qualification level. So it’s encouraging to see the Government considering how to bolster this vital talent pipeline.

Part of this involves ensuring postgraduate study is more accessible to students from broad backgrounds, as well as increasing opportunities and support for people to use their skills and expertise in research settings. It’s an area that has long been overlooked in widening participation conversations, which is why the Russell Group recently launched a dedicated workstream to consider policies and share best practice. It’s about increasing opportunity, but also about ensuring we harness a wide spectrum of skills, knowledge and perspectives to inform vital research. For this to succeed, the conditions and culture of research must be set up to retain talent through the trickier early-career stages. It’s promising to see commitments to improving conditions, such as parental and medical leave, so postgraduate researcher students have the support they need.

As always, many of the challenges come back to funding. Cost recovery on research is at a historic low, threatening the sustainability and global competitiveness of valuable R&D. Although UKRI commits to funding 80% of the full cost of grants, the reality is UK universities are only receiving 67% of their costs from funders – down from 75% in 2015/16. The Russell Group has previously explored a number of drivers behind this, and the white paper does reiterate some of the useful steps UKRI is taking. This includes making sure equipment is funded at 80% and confirming that matched funding by universities, which increasingly eats into cost-recovery rates, is not required. These are not new announcements – and there’s a long way to go if we’re to reach that 80% funding benchmark – but the government is making the right noises on better understanding cost-recovery challenges and pledging a concerted effort alongside charities, funding bodies and universities to tackle the problem together.

The white paper places significant emphasis on the role of universities in regional economic growth and commits to creating a research system that enables collaboration and supports specialisation. We await further details on the “funding reforms” that will achieve this, but it’s encouraging to see a renewed commitment to dual support research funding and QR, and protecting curiosity-driven research through a new strategic objective for UKRI. We hope this means the government will be looking to address the real-terms decline in QR seen in recent years (down by 16.5% since 2010).

The white paper also confirms that we can expect a review of the HEIF as the Government looks to align it more closely with the growth mission. We know HEIF brings great returns on investment: every £1 invested yields £14.80 at sector-level. Large research-intensive universities deliver an even higher return on investment from their HEIF allocations, as much as £20 once spinout performance is accounted for. We have long called for caps on HEIF to be raised, given its potential. For example, our modelling suggests that tripling HEIF could deliver around £11bn for the economy.

There was no such funding boost indicated in the white paper, but there was recognition of HEIF’s power to generate growth by de-risking innovation, driving technology transfer and building entrepreneurial capacity locally and nationally. However, there are a lot of unanswered questions on how exactly HEIF could be pivoted towards the growth mission.

A major benefit of HEIF, just like QR, is its flexibility. Our universities use it for everything from boosting pre-seed investment capabilities to establishing regional business hubs and empowering student entrepreneurs. It’s natural that the government wants the return on public investment to meet national priorities, but any blanket tailoring of how the fund is spent could impact its regionally specific benefits. It will be important to consult closely with the sector to make sure any review of HEIF enhances how universities contribute to local economies and doesn’t restrict initiatives that are already performing well.

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October 30, 2025
What I told the Senate Commerce Committee about ‘jawboning’

This prepared statement was delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on Oct. 29, 2025.

Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and honorable members of the Committee,

Good morning, and thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is Will Creeley, and I am the legal director of FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending the rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought, the essential qualities of liberty.

I’ve spent nearly 20 years defending the First Amendment rights of speakers from every point on the ideological spectrum. At FIRE, we have one rule: If speech is protected, we’ll defend it.

Typically, the censorship we fight is straightforward: The government punishes a speaker for saying things the government doesn’t like. That’s a classic First Amendment violation, a fastball down the middle. Unfortunately, that kind of textbook censorship isn’t the only way government actors silence disfavored or dissenting speech.

Far too often, government officials from both sides of the partisan divide engage in “jawboning” — that is, they abuse the actual or perceived power of their office to threaten, bully, or coerce others into censoring speech. This indirect censorship violates the First Amendment just as surely as direct suppression.

What is jawboning? And does it violate the First Amendment?

Indirect government censorship is still government censorship — and it must be stopped.

Read More

This isn’t new law. The First Amendment’s prohibition against coerced censorship dates back decades, to the Supreme Court’s 1963 ruling in Bantam Books v. Sullivan. In that case, the Court confronted a Rhode Island state commission that sent threatening letters, “phrased virtually as orders,” to booksellers distributing “objectionable” titles — with follow-up visits from police, to ensure the message had been received.

The Court held the commission’s “operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress.” And in the decades since, courts have consistently heeded Bantam Books’ call to “look through forms to the substance” of censorship, and to remain vigilant against both formal and informal schemes to silence speech.

But government officials regularly abuse their power to silence others, so the lesson of Bantam Books bears repeating. And in deciding National Rifle Association of America v. Vullo last year, the Supreme Court unanimously and emphatically reaffirmed it.

In Vullo, New York State officials punished the NRA for its views on gun rights by threatening regulatory enforcement against insurance companies that did business with the group and offering leniency to those who stopped. New York’s backdoor censorship was successful — and unlawful.

This regulatory carrot-and-stick approach was designed to chill speech, and the Court reiterated that “a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly: A government official cannot coerce a private party to punish or suppress disfavored speech on her behalf.”

A government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly.

To be sure, the government may speak for itself, and the public has an interest in hearing from it. But it may not wield that power to censor. As Judge Richard Posner put it: The government is “entitled to what it wants to say — but only within limits.” Under no circumstances may our public servants “employ threats to squelch the free speech of private citizens.”

So the law is clear: Government actors cannot silence a speaker by threatening “we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way,” as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission did last month. Nevertheless, recent examples of jawboning abound: against private broadcasters, private universities, private social media platforms, and more. The First Amendment does not abide mob tactics.

Despite the clarity of the law, fighting back against jawboning is difficult. Targeted speakers can’t sue federal officials for monetary damages for First Amendment violations, removing a powerful deterrent. And as a practical matter, informal censorship is often invisible to those silenced.

That’s particularly true in the context of social media platforms, as demonstrated by another recent Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri.

Jawboning betrays our national commitment to freedom of expression.

Murthy involved coercive demands by Biden administration officials to social media platforms about posts related to Covid-19, vaccines, elections, and other subjects, resulting in the suppression of speech the administration opposed. But the Court held the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, because the causal link between their deleted posts and the administration’s pressure wasn’t sufficiently clear.

Murthy illustrates a severe information disparity: Users whose speech is suppressed have no way to know if government actors put their thumb on the scale. Only the government and the platforms have that knowledge, and usually neither want to share it.

That’s why FIRE authored model legislation that would require the government to disclose communications between federal agencies and social media companies regarding content published on its platform, with limited exceptions. But transparency is not enough. Federal officials must be meaningfully deterred from jawboning, and held accountable when they do.

Jawboning betrays our national commitment to freedom of expression. Congress should take action to stop it.

Thank you for your time. I welcome your questions.

View FIRE’s full testimony with briefs for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on October 29, 2025

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October 29, 2025
What over 5,000 transnational education students and staff told us about their digital experiences
This guest blog was kindly authored by Dr Tabetha Newman, CEO and Senior Researcher at Timmus Research and Elizabeth Newall, Senior Sector Specialist at Jisc.

Transnational education (TNE) is the delivery of UK higher education qualifications in countries other than the UK, allowing students to study for a UK degree without relocating to the UK. It can take various forms, including distance learning, overseas branch campuses, joint degrees, and partnerships with local institutions.

In July, we asked a simple but pressing question in a HEPI blog: Who’s listening to the TNE student experience? With rising UK TNE student numbers and an increasingly competitive global education landscape, the quality of the TNE experience is central to the success of UK higher education abroad.

Over the past three years, Jisc has been listening. Our research has focused on better understanding the digital experience of both international students (those travelling to the UK to study), and TNE students (those who study for a UK Higher Education award overseas), along with the staff who teach them. What we’ve found challenges assumptions and highlights the complexity of delivering equitable learning experiences across digital borders.

The known challenges

In July, Jisc published its first TNE report, drawing on HESA’s most recent international and TNE student data, and describing four digital challenges to global education delivery that UK providers and sector leaders already recognise:
1. Connectivity and access to devices and technology.
2. Access to digital resources such as online platforms, software, e-books and e-journals.
3. Cultural differences in how digital is used to support teaching and learning.
4. The digital skills of students and staff.
These challenges are not new, but what’s been missing is a deeper understanding of how they present in real life, across different countries, contexts, and modes of delivery.

Listening to lived experience

This month Jisc launches its second TNE report, based on the feedback gathered in partnership with 19 UK higher education providers of over 5,000 students and staff in 51 instances of TNE in over 30 countries. Insights were gathered from all forms of teaching delivery, from fully online to classroom-based.

The report provides the sector with vital detail on lived experiences of students and staff in relation to the four known digital challenges listed above. They reveal not just the presence of digital challenges, but the nuances of how they’re experienced, and how they shape access and engagement. The feedback also identified:
- Differences in connectivity and access by country and global region.
- How digital is used to support teaching and learning in different learning course contexts.
- Digital challenges as identified by fly-in, remote and host country staff, and what additional support and training is required
- Feedback in relation to themes such as internationalising and localising curricula, assessment, and use of GenAI.
Rethinking Delivery

These insights prompt a difficult but necessary question: are global learners accessing UK TNE as intended?

The answer in many cases is no. UK qualifications retain global recognition, yet Jisc’s findings challenge us to rethink delivery: high-quality education loses impact if TNE students and staff are unable to access or engage with it as planned.

Key issues identified include:
- Connectivity and availability of equipment: TNE students’ ability to study online is shaped, not just by when they want to learn, but when they can connect. Access to a reliable electricity supply; availability of free Wi-Fi; small versus large screen device use; and reliance on cellular data (at personal cost) varies significantly between countries and global areas.
- Access to digital resources and learning materials: Global digital resource access is heavily influenced by publisher and software licensing restrictions, national regulations and infrastructure gaps which vary from country to country. Students frequently cite difficulties using online resources, and express frustration with time-limited access and high data costs.
- Cultural differences in digital educational practice: Teaching practice differs between countries and cultures, notably in relation to expectations of independent study, feedback and collaboration. Students’ prior experience and expectations related to digital learning can vary as a result.
- Digital skills and capabilities: Confidence in digital skills varies by learning mode, with online or distance learners receiving the least guidance. Unclear or conflicting guidance around the use of digital tools such as AI is identified as a concern for both students and staff.
What needs to change?

The report doesn’t just give voice to lived experiences, it provides practical recommendations for HE providers and policymakers. These are broken into topics including:
- Digital resource planning with global access in mind.
- Curriculum design and delivery for diverse learning contexts.
- Communicating clearly with TNE students.
- Staff training and support.
- Digital capabilities development across all modes of delivery.
Importantly, the report responds to recent calls for greater transparency in TNE student experience data by providing a publicly accessible source of student voice – inviting the sector to engage, reflect, and act.

Sector voices

The response from sector leaders has been enthusiastic and deeply thoughtful.

Griff Ryan, Head of TNE at Universities UK International, welcomed the report, commenting:

Recent years have seen significant progress in understanding the experiences of TNE students, and this report continues that trend… With findings broken down by global region and mode of delivery, the report offers valuable guidance for universities and policymakers alike… This report is a timely and practical resource for institutions looking to strengthen their TNE offer. I’d like to thank Jisc and the 19 contributing universities for their work, and I look forward to the conversations and actions it will help to shape.

Professor Dibyesh Anand, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement and Employability), University of Westminster reminds us that:

Transnational education is meant to spread the benefits and cultures of internationalised education, and to an extent, ‘democratise’ it, around the world. Yet, this important report is a sobering reminder that inequities prevent a uniform experience with TNE. Therefore, universities need to be mindful about having understanding, resources, and processes to challenge inequities, provide consistency while accepting healthy differences, and encourage an inclusive education.

Professor David Carter, Dean of Teaching and Leaning at the University of Reading, and author of the November 2024 HEPI report The student experience of transnational education, highlights the importance of challenging our assumptions:

This is one of the largest and most comprehensive pieces of research into the student experience of UK transnational education. Behind the responses and the insights lies a huge variety of student and staff experience. The report brings several issues into much sharper focus. For UK providers, often the biggest challenge comes with our own assumptions. Things that we take for granted in the UK can be points of difference when it comes to TNE students. This includes everything, from how students access higher education to their attitudes to learning. A core skill for academic and professional staff who work in transnational education, therefore, is adaptability combined with respect for cultural differences. The recommendations in this report provide a useful toolkit for providers to use as they seek to expand TNE provision. It shows that there are clear gains to be made if UK providers work together to address common challenges.

What’s next?

Jisc’s TNE digital experience research is ongoing. We’ll continue working with providers to support more equitable digital learning and teaching, and we invite you to be part of that journey.

To stay informed, sign up to the mailing list: ji.sc/stay-informed-isdx
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October 9, 2025
Students told degrees revoked in WSU hack – Campus Review

Western Sydney University (WSU) has been warned it may be in breach of its data safety obligations by the university watchdog after thousands of students and graduates received scam emails claiming their qualifications had been stripped.

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October 8, 2025
US study visa applicants told to make social media accounts ‘public’ amid vetting crackdown
New social media privacy requirements come just as US government lifts four week-long study visa interview freeze, leading to fears of a backlog.

Concerns of added complications where consular officers responsible for social media vetting do not speak the applicant’s language.

Policy extends even to those who have been issued US visas in the past.
In an update sent to consulates last week, the US government has advised that all those applying for F, M or J nonimmigrant visas are “requested” to make their social media accounts available to view by anybody so that their identity can be verified and they can be thoroughly vetted before entering the country.

Immigration experts have criticised the move because of the huge additional workload it will place on immigration officers, meaning that visa issuance is likely to slow down considerably.

US immigration lawyer James Hollis said he “almost [felt] bad” for consular officers.

“It’s going to grind processing to a halt and will likely result in increased wait times for all nonimmigrant visas, let alone the student and exchange visitor applicants,” the business immigration specialist at the McEntee Law Group warned – noting that there are added complications where applicants were posting on social media in their own local language if officers do not understand what they have written.

It appears that the new policy will be mandatory from June 25 onwards, and all applicants will be vetted in this way even if they have been issued a US visa in the past.

It’s going to grind processing to a halt and will likely result in increased wait times for all nonimmigrant visas, let alone the student and exchange visitor applicants
_{James Hollis, McEntee Law Group}

Consulates are advised that they should consider whether active social media privacy settings “reflect evasiveness or otherwise call into question the applicant’s credibility”.

Officers have been told to reject a visa application in cases where the applicant has:
- expressed “hostile attitudes” toward the US in terms of its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles;
- advocated for or supported “designated foreign terrorists and other threats to US national security”;
- shown or supported anti-semitism;
- even if they have otherwise proven they are not an immigration risk;
- and are not already ineligible for a visa (ie does not post a risk to US national security).
In these cases, the US can deny entry on national security or foreign policy grounds.

The US has asked visa applicants to provide social media information on their application forms for the past five years – including all social media names or handles of every platform they have used over the past five years. Failing to include this information could lead to an applicant’s visa being denied and being ineligible for future visas.

It comes after a tumultuous few weeks for prospective international students eyeing a place at US institutions. After stretching a study visa interview freeze into its fourth week – despite assurances that the pause would be quick – officials last week resumed interviews with additional social media vetting for applicants.

US stakeholders have repeatedly expressed concerns that the Trump administration’s extreme social media crackdown could inflict untold damage upon the country’s international education sector.
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June 23, 2025
After Michigan State trustees told students to call professor a racist, his lawsuit is moving ahead

Professor Jack Lipton scored a victory for free speech last week after a federal court allowed his lawsuit to move forward against two Michigan State University trustees who he claims not only urged students to call him racist, but told them how to phrase it.

In his lawsuit, Lipton alleged that two trustees, Rema Vassar and Dennis Denno, met with MSU students, encouraged them to file complaints against Lipton with MSU’s internal civil rights office, and asked students to condemn Lipton as racist in public statements, op-eds, and on social media. MSU hired the law firm Miller & Chevalier to conduct an independent investigation, producing a report you can read online. According to Lipton, it found that Vassar and Denno planned the attacks and even provided others with specific language to paint Lipton as racist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim.

For example, in one recorded conversation, Denno told students, “The other thing you can do to help us is attack Jack Lipton, the Chair of the Faculty Senate . . . call him out, call him a racist.”

What was Lipton’s “racist” crime?

In October 2023, at a public Board of Trustees meeting that followed an open letter accusing then-BOT Chair Vassar of ethics violations, Lipton read a resolution on behalf of faculty calling for Vassar’s resignation. The meeting erupted in chaos, marked by jeers from Vassar’s supporters.

The Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.

The next day, while making clear he was speaking in his personal capacity and not as a faculty representative, Lipton told a reporter that Vassar could have stopped the chaos of the meeting with “a single statement … yet she elected to let the mob rule the room.”

That single word — mob — triggered what Lipton describes as a coordinated retaliation campaign by Vassar and Denno.

Lipton apologized for using the word “mob,” as well as for any unintended racial undertones, but did not stop calling for accountability over Vassar’s alleged ethics violations — and he says Vassar and Denno’s harassment of him continued.

In November 2023, the NAACP Michigan State Conference Youth & College Division released a statement accusing Lipton of “racial terrorism.” Also that month, the organization Diverse: Issues In Higher Education published an op-ed arguing that Lipton had used the word “mob” because he wanted to traumatize black and Palestinian students. At a BOT meeting that December, Denno read a statement accusing Lipton of “criminalizing students” and described his use of the word “mob” as “racism and violent language.”

What’s more, even though the board eventually voted to censure both Vassar and Denno, as advised by investigators for a range of misconduct including their attacks on Lipton, Vassar didn’t stop there. At a meeting in September 2024, she mocked Lipton and questioned his right to speak on matters of civil discourse, which he cites as yet another effort to chill his speech.

In language as dry as it was devastating, the court summarized the allegations that these trustees abused their power to carry out what amounts to a smear campaign. Lipton claims that Vassar and Denno “used their positions as BOT members to attack Lipton for the comment he made as a private citizen” and “used their BOT pulpit to funnel adverse action towards Lipton via proxies, leveraging their BOT membership to speak through students, supporters, and members of the public.”

The court also noted that Lipton’s original “mob” comment was “speech regarding matters of public concern,” as it critiqued the behavior of a public official at a public meeting, and Lipton made the remark as a private citizen. The First Amendment protects faculty when they speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, such as raising state university ethics violations to the media, as Lipton did.

UPDATE: Another federal appeals court backs academic free speech for public employees

After FIRE secured a lawyer for a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, the school reached a resolution but later reneged on the deal. That’s when the professor sued.

Read More

While the court dismissed MSU and its Board of Trustees as defendants, Lipton is now free to pursue his claims against Vassar and Denno themselves — and they have not exactly covered themselves in glory. The university investigation that recommended their censure found that Vassar had taken courtside tickets and free flights while Denno had pressured consultants reviewing MSU’s response to the 2023 mass shooting on campus to tone down any criticism of the trustees. In fact, just this week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined the MSU board’s official request to remove Vassar and Denno, though the governor’s counsel said this “by no means indicates a condoning of the conduct alleged in the referral.” Vassar and Denno may have retained their seats on the board, but they are hardly out of the woods.

Now, Lipton’s case moves to discovery, where we’ll get a closer look at how MSU’s top brass reacted when a faculty member stepped out of line by doing his civic duty, and potentially to trial. While this week’s court decision is far from a final ruling, it shows the court believes Lipton’s allegations deserve to be heard, and it’s a reminder that the Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.

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June 5, 2025
UKRI has too many people telling it what to do without the resources to do what it’s told

UKRI has a massive job.

As the National Audit Office’s (NAO) new report sets out in 2023–24 UKRI assessed close to 29,000 grant funding applications and spent £6bn on innovation grants. It featured in 105 policy papers across 13 ministerial departments in the last three years alone, and it has been seven years since the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) formally set out UKRI’s role and objectives.

Scale

The scale of UKRI’s work is so massive that according to its own estimates

[…] were it to receive a 2% budget increase each year for the following three financial years, its existing legal, statutory and political commitments would take up around 98% of its budget in 2025-26, 84% in 2026–27, and 74% in 2027–28. When also including investments that it considers critical, such as continuing to fund similar numbers of new doctoral students and similar levels of new curiosity-driven research, this would then take up around 103%, 101%, and 99% of its future budget, respectively, in those years

The obvious question here is if UKRI has so much to do, if it is then compelled to do even more, how can it possibly change as government introduces new priorities. Whether it is moonshots, levelling up, supporting the industrial strategy, fuelling government missions, working with devolved authorities, or whatever comes next, UKRI’s funding is so committed it has little bandwidth to put its massive resources behind emerging government strategies.

However, this assumes that UKRI has a clear idea of what it’s supposed to do in the first place.

Roughly, UKRI has a corporate strategy which then informs its funding calls which institutions then bid for and through post award work UKRI then assures that the thing it set out to do is being done in some way. The NAO found that how government communicates its priorities to UKRI is a bewildering mix of things:

ad hoc and routine meetings; board meetings; formal letters; key UK government strategies and mission statements; and spending review budgets. These are not consolidated or ranked, meaning that the government does not currently have an overall picture of what it is asking UKRI to do.

It is therefore not surprising that in UKRI’s own strategy none of its formal objectives are “specific, measurable or time-bound, making it difficult to understand what outcome UKRI is seeking to achieve.”

Priorities

To the outside observer it would seem odd that UKRI doesn’t have a single ministerial letter with a single set of priorities which it can then pursue at the expense of everything else. Instead, in reading the NAO report it seems that UKRI has become the everything box where the entire hopes of a government are pinned, whether UKRI has the resources to achieve them or not.

It’s easy to see how the research funding ecosystem becomes so complex. UKRI is an important part but it sits alongside the likes of ARIA, charitable organisations, national institutes, venture capital, businesses, and others. The bluntest assessment is that if the government is unable to specify a single set of aims for UKRI, UKRI then cannot measure outcomes as clearly as it would like – and even if it could there is little spare budget to pivot its work. The report makes clear that there is ongoing “prioritisation” to address this confusion – but this work will not conclude until after the spending review, by which point key decisions will already have been made.

It’s not that UKRI is failing – by any reasonable assessment it is powering a world-leading research ecosystem, even with some deep cultural challenges – it’s that as NAO point out it is given a lot to do without all the tools to do it, and even when it can measure its work government priorities are liable to change anyway. The one thing that good research and innovation policy needs is time. The one thing every government has is little time to get anything done.

It is even harder to assess whether its measurable things are good value on their own terms. NAO is interested in ensuring the public gets value for money in the things it funds. One of the challenges in assessing whether what UKRI does is good value for money is that outcomes from research and innovation funding are diffuse, happen on a long-time scale, and may even fail but in doing so moves the research ecosystem toward something that works in some hard to measure and adjacent way.

Value

Although not directly captured within the NAO report, assessing value for money within research and innovation also depends on which level it is assessed. For example, there may be investments in breakthrough science which return little direct economic benefits but expand the knowledge of a field in a way they one day might. There may be investments that achieve immediate economic benefits but have few long term economic benefits as new technologies become available.

It is clear that UKRI would benefit from fewer directions and fewer priorities which would allow it to use its resources more efficiently and in turn measure its impact more easily. The problem is that government policy overtakes bureaucratic needs which in turn encourages policy churn.

In lieu of being able to change the nature of politics part of the solution must lie in changing how UKRI works. The organisation is aware of this, and realises it needs a capacity which goes beyond adjusting the direction of its existing activities – rather, one that “incentivises applicants to put forward ideas that align with government objectives which can be quicker and more efficient than setting up new programmes.”

The fundamental problem for policy makers is that they have collectively turned to UKRI with an enormous list of asks without the resources to achieve them. UKRI either needs clearer direction or more resources, or both, what it does not need is more asks without clear priorities.

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May 14, 2025