California State University, Fullerton, (above) is one of the 22 campuses where teamsters are prepared to strike.
David McNew/Getty Images
Members of Teamsters Local 2010, a union representing 1,100 skilled trade employees at the California State University system, voted Monday to authorize a strike across all 22 campuses.
CSU refused to pay contractually guaranteed five percent raises and salary step increases in July, and the union has filed several unfair labor practice complaints against the university system, union representatives said in a news release. Teamsters members are not striking yet, but are prepared to do so “if CSU continues to break the law, ignore their contract, and refuse to pay the raises that its skilled workforce is owed,” the release stated.
“CSU is steering itself into a completely avoidable battle with the Teamsters Union. Our members will not stand by while the University commits unfair practices, misuses state funds, breaks its promises, and enriches executives at the expense of the workers who keep its campuses running,” Jason Rabinowitz, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 2010, said in the release. “CSU’s greed, dishonesty and disrespect for its workforce are indefensible. This vote makes clear that we are ready to strike if CSU continues to rip us off while lining their own pockets.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the CSU Chancellor’s office said the vote is procedural and that a strike is not necessarily “imminent.”
“The result of the strike authorization vote is disappointing, as the current labor agreement, negotiated and ratified through the collaborative collective bargaining process, contained clear contingency provisions language that tied certain salary increases to the receipt of new, unallocated, ongoing state funding. Those contingencies were not met, leading to the current reopener negotiations on salary terms,” the spokesperson said. “We believe the time and resources of all parties would be more productively devoted to the bargaining table, where meaningful progress can be made, rather than toward preparing for a strike.”
The committee that advises on national vaccine policy today overturned a decades-long recommendation that newborns be immunized for hepatitis B, a policy credited with nearly eliminating the highly contagious and dangerous virus in infants.
The decision came in an 8-3 vote from the committee that has been handpicked by Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time vaccine skeptic. It followed three previous failed attempts to vote on the measure and two days of contentious, confused hearings that further undermined the group’s credibility.
Amy Middleman, a longtime committee liaison and a University of Oklahoma pediatrics professor, said it was the first time the committee “is voting on a policy that, based on all of the available and credible evidence … actually puts children in this country at higher risk — rather than lower risk — of disease and death.”
Susan J. Kressly, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which is continuing to recommend the hepatitis B vaccine at birth, called the committee’s guidance “irresponsible and purposely misleading” and said that it will bring about more infections in infants and children.
“This is the result of a deliberate strategy to sow fear and distrust among families” she said.
The members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP, who voted in favor of the new guidance said the universal birth dose, first introduced in 1991, had likely played a small role in the reduction of acute cases and noted that the country’s policy was an outlier when compared to those of peer nations, which have more targeted approaches. They also raised concerns about the safety of the vaccine, arguing there were insufficient trials done, a claim that has been widely debunked.
The committee’s new recommendations still include a dose of the vaccine within the first 24 hours of life for infants born to hepatitis B-positive mothers. But for those born to mothers testing negative, they recommend “individual-based decision-making, in consultation with a health care provider” to decide “when or if” to give the vaccine.
Removing the universal birth dose “has a great potential to cause harm,” dissenting committee member Joseph Hibbeln said, “and I simply hope that the committee will accept its responsibility when this harm is caused.”
The committee also voted to upend the rest of the schedule for the hepatitis B vaccine, which is required for school attendance in the vast majority of states and historically included three doses in an infant’s first year. Now, after the first dose, parents will be encouraged to ask their doctors to check infants for a sufficient immune response before proceeding with any future doses, a practice that currently lacks any scientific evidence, according to vaccine experts.
The recommendation now heads to Jim O’Neill, the acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, newly installed after September’s ousting of the previously confirmed director, who said she resisted Kennedy Jr.’s demands to pre-approve vaccine recommendations and fire career scientists.
O’Neill’s decision could impact not only the vaccine’s availability, but also its accessibility, since both public and private health insurers look to these policies to determine coverage.
“The American people have benefited from the committee’s well-informed, rigorous discussion about the appropriateness of a vaccination in the first few hours of life,” O’Neill said in a statement Friday.
Rochelle Walensky is the former CDC director and is now a Harvard University medical professor. (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
Former CDC director Rochelle Walensky, now a Harvard University medical professor who recently co-authored a paper on the importance of the hepatitis B birth dose, projected that eliminating it for infants whose mothers test negative will raise the number of newborn hepatitis B cases by 8% each year.
“We rely on an infrastructure of vaccines not only to protect ourselves and our children, but to protect our communities and one another,” Walensky said. “Today’s meeting was just another one of those chisels in the infrastructure.”
Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, referred to the committee as “a clown show” in an interview on CNN Friday morning.
“Honestly, it’s a parody of what this committee used to be,” he said. “It’s hard to watch, and for those of us who care about children, it’s especially hard to watch.”
Offit said he doubted that the committee understood how hepatitis B was transmitted in young children — half the time through the mother during childbirth but just as often through casual contact with someone who was chronically infected and didn’t know it. About 50% of the millions of Americans infected with hepatitis B are unaware of it.
“By loosening the [immunization] reins, you are just putting children in harm’s way,” Offit said.
The hepatitis B vaccine was first recommended by ACIP in 1982. Before that point, an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people, including about 20,000 children, were infected with the highly contagious virus each year.
This was particularly dangerous for infants who have a 90% chance of developing liver cancer or chronic liver disease, if they contract the virus. For 4- and 5-year-olds, that chance remains high at 30-40%.
Committee members argued the guidance change reflected a return to pre-1990s policies that focused on a targeted approach, rather than a universal one. A number of them said that these earlier practices were successful and sufficient in cutting hepatitis B rates, a claim other experts — including those at the CDC — refuted.
In a departure from typical practices, presentations on disease rates and safety concerns at the hearing were not given by CDC subject-matter experts, but instead were led by a climate researcher and a known anti-vaccine activist, who authored a since-retracted paper on the impact of rising autism rates.
Amy Middleman, a pediatrics professor at the University of Oklahoma. (University of Oklahoma)
When one CDC hepatitis B expert was invited to weigh in during a question-and-answer period, he expressed concern about the presented research and emphasized the lack of evidence to support the committee’s changes. Middleman jumped in at one point to correct the committee when it misinterpreted “the conclusions of my own study.”
Throughout the meeting, Kennedy Jr.’s appointees spoke about the importance of protecting parents’ rights, seemingly pitting this against public health policy.
“My personal bias is to err on the side of enabling individual decision making and individual rights over the right [of] the collective,” said Robert Malone, the committee’s vice chair who led the meeting since newly appointed chair Kirk Milhoan, a cardiologist and critic of the COVID vaccine for children, was unavailable to attend in person.
Earlier this year, the committee also voted to change policies surrounding the measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chickenpox) combination vaccine and this year’s COVID 19 booster.
Historically, committee members were highly qualified medical professionals, vetted for months to years before serving. But, in an unprecedented upheaval in June, Kennedy Jr. fired all 17 existing advisory members via a Wall Street Journal op-ed — after promising he would leave the committee’s recommendations intact — and hastily replaced them.
Many of the new members have espoused anti-vaccine rhetoric and other scientific misinformation and a number of them do not have medical degrees or significant experience in the field.
Cody Meissner, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine and the only committee member to have previously served, also opposed the guidance change.
Cody Meissner is a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. (Dartmouth College)
“We’ve heard ‘do no harm’ is a moral imperative,” he said. “We are doing harm by changing this wording, and I vote no.”
The committee vote was the latest in a wave of policy changes, firings and general chaos at the CDC and HHS that have alarmed experts since Kennedy Jr. took charge almost a year ago.
Last week, the Food and Drug Administration’s chief medical and scientific officer released an unsupported memo claiming COVID-19 vaccinations had contributed to the deaths of at least 10 children. Last month, Kennedy Jr. ordered CDC staff to change information on their website to promote a link between vaccines and autism, a widely discredited theory that he has promoted for years.
According to Offit, the negative impacts are already being seen: This year tallied the greatest number of measles cases (1,828) since it was declared eliminated in 2000, the majority of which were in unvaccinated children, two of whom died. It marked the first pediatric measles deaths since 2003.
There have also been nearly 300 childhood flu deaths — among predominantly unvaccinated kids — the most seen since the country’s last flu pandemic and whooping cough cases are surging in some states. The highly contagious respiratory infection, prevented through the DTaP vaccine, has killed three unvaccinated infants in Kentucky.
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Drat. I missed getting to officially contribute to the votes for this year’s Top 100 Tools for Learning, collected and analyzed by Jane Hart. I’m still going to write mine up, as I do like to reflect on the tools I’m relying on for my own and others’ learning, but I’ll need to wait until 2026 to get back into the mix of having my votes reflected in the grand total.
I used to be more regular with my votes, but did miss a few along the way. Here are my past Top 100 Tools for Learning: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.
This year, given that I missed the deadline for submitting my top ten list, I’m using a longer format than normal and structuring this reflection on Harold Jarche’s personal knowledge (PKM) framework, since so much of my learning is centered on it:
Seek > Sense > Share
Throughout all of my days, I’m plugged into intentional ways of seeking knowledge, wisdom, and sources of curiosity. In a way, sense-making is a part of my way of being, especially on those days when I allow myself to slow down enough for the deeper insights. Finally, I’m someone who delights in fueling my curiosity and imagination even further by sharing what I’m learning and inviting others to do the same.
Curious to learn more about personal knowledge mastery? My absolute favorite source for more than a decade now is Harold Jarche, who defines PKM as:
Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information — guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks. – Harold Jarche
Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks. – Harold Jarche
Overcast
Not a day goes by that I don’t use Overcast, my preferred podcast catcher. On my iPhone, it is always my most used app on any given week.
Get ready to celebrate International Podcast Day on September 30. I’ve already got an episode queued up featuring Dominic Conroy & Warren Kidd to commemorate the event. Get your ears on and subscribe to Teaching in Higher Ed, if you haven’t already, using your favorite podcast app (search for Teaching in Higher Ed and hit subscribe/follow), YouTube, or Spotify.
While my backlog of episodes yet to be listened to is ridiculously long, Overcast’s playlists feature means I can tailor my audio consumption according to genre (news, technology, teaching, etc.), to my incoming priority/preferred podcasts, or to the queue list I have saved for the good stuff I want to get to when I have long drives or alone time.
Unread
While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread. – From my 2024 Top 10 blog post (note: I only copied this text over after identifying what tools would be on this year’s list, as in I didn’t “cheat”).
One of the things I love about Unread is that I an perform the entire reading process with two thumbs (insert that joke/about “who has two thumbs and can…” and then add “operate Unread” at the end of it). I can browse the different folders/collections I have set up to skim headlines. When I want to read one of the stories associated with a given headline, I can go into it and read with just a tap. To get back out to the headlines, again, I just swipe right.
One big update that Unread 4.5 gave us is support for reading paywalled articles within the app. As of me writing this, I haven’t had a chance to experiment with that feature, but am excited to do so over this long, holiday weekend in the U.S. Anything I can do to reduce friction in my PKM system helps me be able to expand my possibilities for deeper learning.
YouTube
Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on. – From 2024 Top ten post
YouTube Premium continues to be a way of life for our entire family. If you watch a lot of YouTube and don’t have a means for watching ad-free, I can’t recommend it highly enough.
This past year, we added a Teaching in Higher Ed YouTube Channel. Each time an audio podcast episode gets posted on our hosting platform, Blubrry, it automatically gets shared on the channel. They used to not allow audio-only podcasts on the platform but made changes their rules such that now it is encouraged. In addition to listening to Teaching in Higher Ed, or watching an episode with Dr. Stephenie Cawthon accompanied by two ASL interpreters, you can also see other videos I’ve made this past year, such as:
Kindle App
I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights. – 2024 Top 10 Post
Audible
New on the list for this year is Audible. I was attempting for a few months to better balance my daily news reading with sources that would give me a longer-term view of the world. As I write these words, I feel like I’m back to failing at this, but it was a good pursuit there for a while. Part of this attempt at balancing was made possible through listening to audio books in addition to podcast episodes.
Sometimes audio is better because it allows us to get more reading into our days. Other times, audio does something that the written word could never do. In the list below of some favorite audio boos from this past year, I’ll indicate with (best via audio book) at the end of the line if the audio book was particularly geared toward the audio medium.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing. – Harold Jarche
StoryGraph
I decided to move off of Amazon’s Goodreads for my reading tracking this year and have been loving StoryGraph so far. I just wish more people were there to be friends with and share reading ideas. What I mostly use StoryGraph for is setting an annual reading goal and tracking my progress toward that. I also have quite a large queue of books I would like to read someday.
I understand that some people have a hard time finding something to read. This is not my problem. Trust me. I’ve got the what to possibly read thing down pat. But for those who are looking for suggestions, StoryGraph has that feature nailed, too. If anyone is on StoryGraph and wants to connect, my StoryGraph username is Bonni208 (as it is across most social networks that I’m on). Those curious about why the number 208 is significant to me, check out Teaching in Higher Ed Episode 208, where Dave helps me tell the 208 origin story.
Obsidian
Dave has been using Obsidian for years now and long-heralded the way that these types of note apps don’t lock you in, long-term. Using plain text (Markdown) documents that are stored where you want to keep them (not locked within the note service/subscription/app) means that Obsidian gets used as a way of viewing and adding to your plain text documents. That’s an oversimplification and one that meant I took longer than others to get to the party that is Obsidian.
One thing to know about Obsidian is that there is a learning curve. I would suggest not trying to go your own way on it, but instead to invest in some tools to help with your onboarding. I have three recommendations:
The MacSparky Obsidian Field Guide – This course takes you through how to get started with Obsidian and set up systems to use this note-taking powerhouse to fuel your capacity for learning and teaching.
Obsidian Starter Vault from Mike Schmitz – It can be hard starting from an entirely blank slate in Obsidian, so this starter vault can give you some content to work from and some tips for how to: “get more out of your notes and ideas effortlessly.”
LifeHQ from Mike Schmitz – If you want to go even further with a system built by someone else, you can check out this extensive, customizable vault. I purchased it and over time have found ways to combine how Mike uses Obsidian to something that works better for me, most notably to incorporate my own custom version of Johnny Decimal (which I call Bonni Decimal; Let’s just say it has some emojis in the mix, in addition to the decimals/numbers, which I find quite satisfying) and doesn’t attempt to incorporate task management the way Mike has, instead relying on my beloved OmniFocus Pro.
ChatGPT
Ok. Here goes. I use artificial intelligence, despite knowing that there are plenty of ethical reasons that people may choose not to use AI. I encourage anyone thinking about shaming me or others who use it to read Maha Bali’s post suggesting that we not jump straight to that binary way of thinking about peoples’ use of these technologies. I don’t use it without continually refining my knowledge of what it is and isn’t capable of… but I do find that to be effective in my job, I am required to use it. Additionally, to enable us to cost-effectively offer transcripts for our podcasts and otherwise make our materials more accessible, AI is a must there, too.
I list ChatGPT here, since that is my most frequently-used AI tool, as it relates to learning. I pay for the $20/month paid service and occasionally find myself needing to use the separate pay-as-you-go API key for nichè use-cases. I asked ChatGPT to use what it knows about me to list off the ways that I use it in my learning (seeking, sensing, and sharing), and here is an edited version of it’s bulleted output:
Seeking: exploring big questions about teaching, learning, and AI; summarizing complex articles or reports.
Sensing: refining my “messy”/“chicken scratch” notes into themes, comparing frameworks, and generating questions that deepen reflection and conversation (with colleagues, students, or even my own family).
Sharing: drafting polished communications – everything from faculty emails and strategic planning documents to podcast show notes and library fundraising blurbs.
Iterating: co-creating interactive materials (like Twine games, PollEverywhere prompts, or Canva copy) where I can ask ChatGPT to generate multiple versions until it “clicks.”
Blending Personal + Professional Contexts: whether it’s planning a weekly meal prep strategy, crafting conference questions, or designing playful activities for faculty, ChatGPT helps me weave learning into both my work and life.
It didn’t mention this, but I have been closely following Mike Caulfield‘s experimentation and research on what it can do using argumentation theory to come alongside us in our fact checking with his Deep Background GPT. There’s so much more I could say here, but I’ll save it for future posts.
Readwise
It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights. – 2024 Top 10 post
I saw a video the other night which made mention of the ability to sync Readwise highlights with Obsidian (note taking tool) and that got me excited about that possibility. For now, I’ll be disciplined about placing that idea on my someday/maybe list and not going down the rabbit hole at this exact moment. Another thing on my someday/maybe list to look into more is Lance Eaton’s AI Practice: Building My Quote Collection.
Share
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues. – Harold Jarche
Raindrop
Much of my digital life revolves around digital bookmarking. I could have easily placed Raindrop in with sense making, as on an almost hourly basis, I find myself saving links and placing them in all the various collections (which are like folders) I have on Raindrop and applying tags. Whether I’m reading on my web browser, or via my smartphone or tablet, I can easily save bookmarks and have them accessible to me anytime in the future.
Just the other day, I was talking with a friend who is doing a lot of reflection and reading about loneliness and I asked if he had ever watched Andrea Dorfman’s How To Be Alone. He hadn’t and it was such a delight to be able to resurface that masterpiece and share it with him. I had an insight while watching it this time that since I have been spending more time working in our library lately that it seems like it may be the one place students feel more comfortable being alone than in other spots.
Another fun discovery, found within the deep crevasses of Raindrop was The Gap, by Ira Glass. “Your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you… Most everybody I know who does interesting, creative work, went through this phase for a few years…” Ira normalizes this gap of knowing what you’re doing could be better and being able to “fight your way through the gap.”
While most of my saved bookmarks (tags and collections) are private, I did decide recently to make an RSS feed and page with my saved links within an AI collection from Raindrop. This means that each time I save something related to AI on Raindrop, that anyone subscribed to that feed will have it show up in their RSS aggregator. Additionally, anyone who visits the page will see everything I’ve saved about AI within Raindrop. Candidly, as public as I am with the podcast and many other things, sharing this feed makes me a bit nervous, as I wouldn’t want people to think that I’m necessarily endorsing everything I’m saving. I’m pretty sure people would know that but given how polarizing the topic of AI can be, I still feel a bit nervous about this aspect of my sharing.
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Dive Brief:
A faculty group at Virginia’s George Mason University this week adopted a no-confidence resolution aimed at the institution’s board for its handling of recent attacks on the university by the Trump administration.
George Mason’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors described the board’s response to four government investigations, launched in less than a month, as “inadequate and deeply troubling” in a letter Tuesday to members of George Mason’s board of visitors and state officials.
The group called on the board to publicly defend George Mason President Gregory Washington and to “reaffirm the university’s unwavering commitment to academic freedom, diversity, equity, and inclusive excellence.”
Dive Insight:
Over the course of roughlythree weeks, the Trump administration has opened multiple civil rights probes into George Masonthrough the U.S. Department of Education and U.S. Department of Justice.
The most recent investigation, launched by the Justice Department’s civil rights unit, is looking at whether George Mason’s admissions and scholarship practices violate Title VI, which forbids discrimination based on race, color or national origin at federally funded institutions. It is also probing the university’s response to antisemitism.
A letter this week to the head of George Mason’s board from Harmeet Dhillon,the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, didn’t contain any specific allegations against the university, but stated that “a school administration’s deliberate indifference to a racially hostile educational environment is illegal.”
It followed the Justice Department’s earlier announcement of a probe into racial discrimination in George Mason’s employment practices.In informing officials of that investigation, Dhillon cited past comments by Washington about George Mason’s efforts to diversify its ranks and support women and faculty members of color.
The probes come just weeks after former University of Virginia President Jim Ryan abruptly announced his resignation in June amid pressure from Trump’s Justice Department and a similar investigation into the public institution’s diversity efforts.
In public statements, George Mason’s board — headed by Charles Stimson, who holds leadership positions at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — has said little beyond that it will provide government agencies with requested information and comply with law.
In a statement Tuesday in response to the latest probe, the board said it will “ensure GMU complies with all federal anti-discrimination laws.” In an earlier statement, it said it had a fiduciary obligation to “ensure that the University continues to thrive as the largest public university in Virginia.”
George Mason’s board did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Washington himself has defended the university’s diversity efforts, writing last week, “It is inaccurate to conclude that we created new university policies or procedures that discriminated against or excluded anyone.”
In the resolution, the George Mason AAUP chapter defended Washington’s record at the university where the board has been publicly silent.
“President Washington has demonstrated exceptional leadership by advancing the university’s longstanding commitment to inclusion and diversity, overseeing significant improvements in the university’s national rankings, while still maintaining Mason’s ethos of access and affordability, particularly for first-generation students,” it stated.
The resolution also blasts the board as having “utterly failed to support President Washington and George Mason University during this period of unprecedented and increasing federal scrutiny and political targeting,” adding that “the silence from the Board has become deafening.”
The faculty group additionally called out the board’s choice of attorneys to represent it in talks with the Trump administration,noting that the firm Torridon Law was co-founded by former Attorney General Bill Barr, who served under Trump,and has several prominent Republican lawyers on staff.
Among them is Mike Fragoso, who is handling communications about the investigations for George Mason and was previously chief counsel to former Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell.
“The hiring of Torridon Law PLLC to defend GMU against the Trump administration’s ideological attacks is like hiring a wolf to protect the sheep,” the faculty group wrote.
Torridon’s Fragoso did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The George Mason AAUP “overwhelmingly” voted in favor of the no-confidence resolution, according to the letter to the university’s board.
The United States typically sees an uptick in the general public’s interest in civic issues during presidential election years. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans more closely follow the news during such years, and the 2024 election cycle was no exception to what Pew calls the “typical election year surge” (Younis 2020).
On college campuses, this trend can be palpable as well, with students, faculty, and staff feeling more inclined to get involved in civic affairs in some way. Yet it can be difficult to know how to do so, especially on campuses where there is not already a robust civic participation infrastructure.
This article offers a retrospective on our incipient effort in fall 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh to grow an organization – dubbed simply Plattsburgh Votes – to educate students (in a nonpartisan manner) about voting and to ultimately boost turnout. This is intended to provide guidance for others seeking to galvanize student voting and to create a foundational civic infrastructure on their own campuses for future election cycles. It outlines our approach to conceptualizing student voter engagement, details some key organizational support that is widely accessible to campuses, and reflects on the relative success of different methods of outreach to students.
Understanding the Student Voter Gap
The perception that the latest cohort of young adults is somehow less civically-inclined or interested in politics and current events is, ironically, a trope that recurs with each successive generation. Survey data, however, seem to contradict this notion for members of both the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. According to the American National Election Survey (a reputable source of data widely utilized by political scientists) for instance, young voters (defined as people aged 18-29) in fact show higher levels of interest in elections and public affairs since the turn of the millennium compared to what they reported on surveys conducted between 1976 and 2000 (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 9).
In this vein, when conceptualizing Plattsburgh Votes, my collaborator Dr. Daniel Lake (Associate Professor of Political Science) and I channeled the framework for understanding young voters’ behavior offered by political scientists John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus. Hillygus and Holbein note that while young people indeed exhibit a threshold level of interest in elections and civic affairs, there is still a disconnect between these attitudes and their rates of actual voting. Further, many of them intend to vote, but simply do not manage to – a gap that reaches 30% in some ANES data. As the authors summarize the situation, “young people are not turned off by politics…and yet they are not voting in US elections” (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 8).
To explain the disconnect, they point to what behavioral scientists call “noncognitive skills” as the key impediment to voting among young people. The definition of noncognitive skills varies by context, but they generally refer to “patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior” rather than cognitive aptitudes like reasoning, understanding, and problem solving” (Bjorklund-Young 2016). Noncognitive skills are critical in what Hillygus and Holbein call “follow through” for young people in navigating the practical obstacles and time costs associated with voting, which can be formidable for those unfamiliar with the system (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 14).
Our voter education efforts at SUNY Plattsburgh were therefore oriented toward ameliorating some of these practical barriers to voting, and in the process, helping reinforce the cultivation of the noncognitive skills that students need in order to be civically engaged.
Helping Students Navigate Location-Based Voting Decisions
One reality that became apparent very quickly is that students largely do not have difficulty registering to vote in some capacity before they arrive at college. Our on-the-ground experience echoed the data for our campus tabulated by the National Study of Voting, Learning, and Engagement (NSLVE) project at Tufts University, which is available for most campuses in the United States (National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement 2025). Our latest NSLVE data indicated a registration rate above 70 percent even during the 2022 midterm election cycle. Whether this is due to efforts by K-12 institutions, the success of “motor voter” laws that enable registration when applying for a driver license or other ID, or some other factor, a large majority of the students we contacted through various outreach efforts indeed reported that they were already registered to vote. This of course has implications for how we address our practical guidance: if the majority of them are successfully registered, what is it that they still need help with?
Our experience with Plattsburgh Votes indicates that possibly the most significant remaining hurdle is young people’s relative lack of awareness that voting is a location-specific activity. Perhaps the most important work conducted by our organization involved the tabling efforts, class visits, and digital outreach geared specifically toward helping students make proactive decisions about where they wanted to vote (using either their home or college address), to check where they were indeed registered, and to request absentee ballots. Yet judging by the volume of students who were still unaware that these options required decisive action before a deadline, it is clear that earlier and more emphatic efforts are necessary to help students actually follow through on their intentions.
Peer-to-Peer Outreach: What Worked—and What Didn’t
Another significant takeaway from the fall 2024 initiative concerns the importance of peer influence in student voter education. As Dr. Allison Rank, a political scientist, veteran organizer, and director of SUNY Oswego’s robust “Vote Oswego” initiative emphasized in guidance to our group, students are more receptive to information delivered face-to-face by a peer than from faculty or another authority figure in any medium. Thanks to our submission of an action plan with the All-In Democracy Challenge – which “outline[s] a campus’ landscape, leadership team, goals, strategies and tactics, and evaluation processes” for encouraging voter participation – we were consequently eligible to apply for and receive a mini-grant from All-In that was used to hire three student interns (ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge 2025). Using collectively generated presentations and educational material, these interns took the lead in delivering our in-person educational outreach efforts during the fall 2024 semester.
Yet we learned quickly that in-person outreach efforts led by student peers still must be strategically responsive to the realities of how students apportion their time and attention. Informational classroom visits by student advocates can be especially effective because students can be coached through a process like (re-)registering or requesting a ballot on the spot, minimizing the need for subsequent steps to be completed on their own. To that end, our group likewise concluded that it behooves organizers to focus classroom visits on one discrete process (e.g. “requesting a ballot to vote by mail”) rather than delivering a presentation that covers all relevant aspects of voting comprehensively.
Other forms of outreach were less successful, however. For instance, the student interns reported dismal attendance at the “voting office hours” that they held in common areas of the college residence buildings. While it is possible that our method of publicizing their availability through emails from the residence life director was suboptimal in garnering student attention, the experience also seemed to indicate significant reluctance on the part of students to plan in advance to seek out help and proactively ask questions. Instead, approaches in which the voter education organization’s representatives initiate the contact seem more promising.
The Untapped Power of Pledges
Finally, one tactic which Plattsburgh Votes did not have the time or resources to pursue extensively in fall 2024 was securing pledges from students to take particular voting actions.
Both research as well as conventional wisdom in grassroots organizing holds that people are generally more likely to follow through on an action when they have pledged to take it. Political science researchers testing whether pledging to vote affected voter turnout in fact found specifically that first-time young voters were likeliest to follow through and vote when they pledged to (Costa, Schaffner, and Prevost 2018). It seems promising, then, for both our organization and any others engaging in student voter education to brainstorm methods of soliciting pledges from students and then following up to remind them of their pledges as deadlines approach.
The campus-specific data on 2024 voter turnout from NSLVE is not yet available. Preliminary reports from the CIRCLE organization at Tufts (which administers the program) estimates that youth turnout in 2024 was down from 2020 to a rate of around 42%, but was stronger in battleground states like Pennsylvania (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement 2025).We are confident that Plattsburgh Votes was able to have some impact on closing the gap between registration rate and actual voter turnout, but the precise magnitude remains to be seen. Regardless, it is clear that continued effort on campuses is necessary. The efforts must find creative, contextually-sensitive ways to account for the role that “noncognitive skills” play in affecting voting behavior and help students with the procedural aspects of voting so that they can successfully follow through on their intentions.
Dr. Ben Medeiros is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh. His teaching and research focus on political communication, media law, and digital media culture. Medeiros is on the editorial board of the journal Communication & Democracy and the author of the book Reputation Management Online: America’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ (Routledge/National Communication Association, 2022).
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “The Youth Vote in 2024.” CIRCLE. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://circle.tufts.edu/2024-election.
Costa, Mia, Brian F. Schaffner, and Alicia Prevost. “Walking the Walk? Experiments on the Effect of Pledging to Vote on Youth Turnout.” PLoS One 13, no. 5 (May 29, 2018): e0197066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197066.
Holbein, John B., and D. Sunshine Hillygus. Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. “About NSLVE.” National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://nslve.tufts.edu/about-us.
The United States typically sees an uptick in the general public’s interest in civic issues during presidential election years. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans more closely follow the news during such years, and the 2024 election cycle was no exception to what Pew calls the “typical election year surge” (Younis 2020).
On college campuses, this trend can be palpable as well, with students, faculty, and staff feeling more inclined to get involved in civic affairs in some way. Yet it can be difficult to know how to do so, especially on campuses where there is not already a robust civic participation infrastructure.
This article offers a retrospective on our incipient effort in fall 2024 at SUNY Plattsburgh to grow an organization – dubbed simply Plattsburgh Votes – to educate students (in a nonpartisan manner) about voting and to ultimately boost turnout. This is intended to provide guidance for others seeking to galvanize student voting and to create a foundational civic infrastructure on their own campuses for future election cycles. It outlines our approach to conceptualizing student voter engagement, details some key organizational support that is widely accessible to campuses, and reflects on the relative success of different methods of outreach to students.
Understanding the Student Voter Gap
The perception that the latest cohort of young adults is somehow less civically-inclined or interested in politics and current events is, ironically, a trope that recurs with each successive generation. Survey data, however, seem to contradict this notion for members of both the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. According to the American National Election Survey (a reputable source of data widely utilized by political scientists) for instance, young voters (defined as people aged 18-29) in fact show higher levels of interest in elections and public affairs since the turn of the millennium compared to what they reported on surveys conducted between 1976 and 2000 (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 9).
In this vein, when conceptualizing Plattsburgh Votes, my collaborator Dr. Daniel Lake (Associate Professor of Political Science) and I channeled the framework for understanding young voters’ behavior offered by political scientists John Holbein and Sunshine Hillygus. Hillygus and Holbein note that while young people indeed exhibit a threshold level of interest in elections and civic affairs, there is still a disconnect between these attitudes and their rates of actual voting. Further, many of them intend to vote, but simply do not manage to – a gap that reaches 30% in some ANES data. As the authors summarize the situation, “young people are not turned off by politics…and yet they are not voting in US elections” (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 8).
To explain the disconnect, they point to what behavioral scientists call “noncognitive skills” as the key impediment to voting among young people. The definition of noncognitive skills varies by context, but they generally refer to “patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior” rather than cognitive aptitudes like reasoning, understanding, and problem solving” (Bjorklund-Young 2016). Noncognitive skills are critical in what Hillygus and Holbein call “follow through” for young people in navigating the practical obstacles and time costs associated with voting, which can be formidable for those unfamiliar with the system (Holbein and Hillygus 2020, 14).
Our voter education efforts at SUNY Plattsburgh were therefore oriented toward ameliorating some of these practical barriers to voting, and in the process, helping reinforce the cultivation of the noncognitive skills that students need in order to be civically engaged.
Helping Students Navigate Location-Based Voting Decisions
One reality that became apparent very quickly is that students largely do not have difficulty registering to vote in some capacity before they arrive at college. Our on-the-ground experience echoed the data for our campus tabulated by the National Study of Voting, Learning, and Engagement (NSLVE) project at Tufts University, which is available for most campuses in the United States (National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement 2025). Our latest NSLVE data indicated a registration rate above 70 percent even during the 2022 midterm election cycle. Whether this is due to efforts by K-12 institutions, the success of “motor voter” laws that enable registration when applying for a driver license or other ID, or some other factor, a large majority of the students we contacted through various outreach efforts indeed reported that they were already registered to vote. This of course has implications for how we address our practical guidance: if the majority of them are successfully registered, what is it that they still need help with?
Our experience with Plattsburgh Votes indicates that possibly the most significant remaining hurdle is young people’s relative lack of awareness that voting is a location-specific activity. Perhaps the most important work conducted by our organization involved the tabling efforts, class visits, and digital outreach geared specifically toward helping students make proactive decisions about where they wanted to vote (using either their home or college address), to check where they were indeed registered, and to request absentee ballots. Yet judging by the volume of students who were still unaware that these options required decisive action before a deadline, it is clear that earlier and more emphatic efforts are necessary to help students actually follow through on their intentions.
Peer-to-Peer Outreach: What Worked—and What Didn’t
Another significant takeaway from the fall 2024 initiative concerns the importance of peer influence in student voter education. As Dr. Allison Rank, a political scientist, veteran organizer, and director of SUNY Oswego’s robust “Vote Oswego” initiative emphasized in guidance to our group, students are more receptive to information delivered face-to-face by a peer than from faculty or another authority figure in any medium. Thanks to our submission of an action plan with the All-In Democracy Challenge – which “outline[s] a campus’ landscape, leadership team, goals, strategies and tactics, and evaluation processes” for encouraging voter participation – we were consequently eligible to apply for and receive a mini-grant from All-In that was used to hire three student interns (ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge 2025). Using collectively generated presentations and educational material, these interns took the lead in delivering our in-person educational outreach efforts during the fall 2024 semester.
Yet we learned quickly that in-person outreach efforts led by student peers still must be strategically responsive to the realities of how students apportion their time and attention. Informational classroom visits by student advocates can be especially effective because students can be coached through a process like (re-)registering or requesting a ballot on the spot, minimizing the need for subsequent steps to be completed on their own. To that end, our group likewise concluded that it behooves organizers to focus classroom visits on one discrete process (e.g. “requesting a ballot to vote by mail”) rather than delivering a presentation that covers all relevant aspects of voting comprehensively.
Other forms of outreach were less successful, however. For instance, the student interns reported dismal attendance at the “voting office hours” that they held in common areas of the college residence buildings. While it is possible that our method of publicizing their availability through emails from the residence life director was suboptimal in garnering student attention, the experience also seemed to indicate significant reluctance on the part of students to plan in advance to seek out help and proactively ask questions. Instead, approaches in which the voter education organization’s representatives initiate the contact seem more promising.
The Untapped Power of Pledges
Finally, one tactic which Plattsburgh Votes did not have the time or resources to pursue extensively in fall 2024 was securing pledges from students to take particular voting actions.
Both research as well as conventional wisdom in grassroots organizing holds that people are generally more likely to follow through on an action when they have pledged to take it. Political science researchers testing whether pledging to vote affected voter turnout in fact found specifically that first-time young voters were likeliest to follow through and vote when they pledged to (Costa, Schaffner, and Prevost 2018). It seems promising, then, for both our organization and any others engaging in student voter education to brainstorm methods of soliciting pledges from students and then following up to remind them of their pledges as deadlines approach.
The campus-specific data on 2024 voter turnout from NSLVE is not yet available. Preliminary reports from the CIRCLE organization at Tufts (which administers the program) estimates that youth turnout in 2024 was down from 2020 to a rate of around 42%, but was stronger in battleground states like Pennsylvania (Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement 2025).We are confident that Plattsburgh Votes was able to have some impact on closing the gap between registration rate and actual voter turnout, but the precise magnitude remains to be seen. Regardless, it is clear that continued effort on campuses is necessary. The efforts must find creative, contextually-sensitive ways to account for the role that “noncognitive skills” play in affecting voting behavior and help students with the procedural aspects of voting so that they can successfully follow through on their intentions.
Dr. Ben Medeiros is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at SUNY Plattsburgh. His teaching and research focus on political communication, media law, and digital media culture. Medeiros is on the editorial board of the journal Communication & Democracy and the author of the book Reputation Management Online: America’s ‘Right To Be Forgotten’ (Routledge/National Communication Association, 2022).
Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. “The Youth Vote in 2024.” CIRCLE. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://circle.tufts.edu/2024-election.
Costa, Mia, Brian F. Schaffner, and Alicia Prevost. “Walking the Walk? Experiments on the Effect of Pledging to Vote on Youth Turnout.” PLoS One 13, no. 5 (May 29, 2018): e0197066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0197066.
Holbein, John B., and D. Sunshine Hillygus. Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. “About NSLVE.” National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement. Accessed June 18, 2025. https://nslve.tufts.edu/about-us.
Despite mounting conservative criticism over Santa Ono’s stance on diversity, equity and inclusion, the University of Florida Board of Trustees on Tuesday overwhelmingly voted to hire the former University of Michigan president as its next leader.
Ono, who held three prior presidencies, was named the sole finalist for the top job at Florida in early May. As a traditional academic, Ono marks a break from the norm at Florida’s public universities, where the emphasis in the past few years has been on hiring former Republican lawmakers and others with political connections.
But his candidacy faced heavy criticism from conservative critics such as anti-DEI activist Chris Rufo, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts and several Florida lawmakers, including Republican U.S. senator Rick Scott, who called for an investigation into the search that yielded Ono due to his past remarks on DEI. Some critics have claimed that Ono is a radical liberal academic who made an about-face on DEI due to careerist ambitions.
Ono, who made more than $1.3 million a year at Michigan, where he was under contract until 2032 before he stepped down to pursue the Florida job, could earn up to $3 million a year at UF, according to the salary range.
Ono’s Evolution on DEI
Rufo has led the charge among Ono’s conservative critics.
“Woke is threatening a return to power,” Rufo declared in an opinion piece in the conservative City Journal in which he argued that Ono’s noted past support of DEI policies was disqualifying.
(Although Rufo argued that Ono’s presidency would threaten to undo changes to education in the state driven by Republican Ron DeSantis, the governor has defended the pick.)
Prior to Tuesday’s meeting, Rufo circulated various videos of Ono speaking in favor of DEI policies and against systemic racism. While those videos gained traction on social media, the posts did not sway the UF Board of Trustees, which voted unanimously to hire Ono.
But Ono’s changing stances on DEI did hang over much of Tuesday’s meeting, popping up in multiple questions where Ono discussed his evolution on the issue and noted that he dismantled DEI initiatives at the University of Michigan after his perspective began to shift in late 2023.
“I did not come to bring DEI back; I came to make sure it never returns,” Ono told UF trustees.
Ono argued that while he initially agreed with the aims of DEI programs, while president of the University of Michigan he came to see that such initiatives were divisive and diverted resources from student success, leading to his decision to shutter the DEI office there earlier this year.
He argued that “large DEI bureaucracies” stifle open dialogue and erode trust on campus and that “it became clear to me through experience, not theory, that something had gone wrong.”
Ono sought to distance himself from his prior statements, arguing that what matters “is not what I said two to six years ago,” as depicted in the videos, but rather what he has done in the last 18 months, which includes winding down the DEI office at Michigan before he resigned last month. Although the move came after increased criticism of DEI spending at Michigan, Ono cast it as a move that grew out of conversations he began having in late 2023 in which he questioned the efficacy of such initiatives.
He also stressed again how his vision aligns with the goals of UF and DeSantis.
“I understand and support what Florida’s vision for higher education represents: a decisive move away from ideological bias and activist-driven culture that has come to define too many colleges and universities in this country and abroad,” Ono said. “The goal is not to replace one orthodoxy with another. It is to restore balance, to protect the pursuit of truth and create a university environment where all students can thrive, regardless of their viewpoint. Florida is showing the nation that it’s possible to elevate academic excellence without ideological indoctrination.”
While issues like faculty recruiting and retention, post-tenure review, college athletics, and other aspects of running the university were addressed in an almost three-hour public interview, much of that time, and the board’s questions, centered on DEI and campus protests.
For instance, Ono was asked multiple times about concerns of rising antisemitism on campus.
He responded that antisemitism is “a persistent threat, especially on college campuses” that “too often hides behind the language of political critique” and has been “normalized in the name of activism.” Ono also emphasized a commitment to keeping Jewish students safe at UF.
Asked about his decision to allow a pro-Palestinian encampment to remain at Michigan for 30 days, Ono said that the university did not want to escalate the situation and create an atmosphere of unrest close to commencement. He added that he spoke with Jewish students who were worried about how removing the encampment might disrupt commencement. Ono also said that Michigan subsequently updated its time, place and manner policies to prevent future encampment protests.
A Looming Battle?
Although the UF Board of Trustees approved the Ono hire, it’s not a done deal, as the Florida Board of Governors has the final say.
That board will meet in either mid-June or at a special meeting to consider Ono. That could provide another opportunity for Ono’s conservative critics to derail the hire if the Board of Governors comes out against the selection.
Florida representative Greg Steube, a Republican, immediately called for the board to block the hire.
“The @UF Board of Trustees has made a grave mistake. Today, Dr. Ono gave it his best ‘college try’ walking back his woke past, claiming he’s now ‘evolved.’ But I’m not sold. This role is too important to gamble on convenient conversions,” Steube wrote on social media Tuesday.
At least one member of the Board of Governors noted over the weekend that concerns about Ono will be addressed.
“The UF Board of Trustees is responsible for vetting the issues raised by concerned stakeholders, which their fiduciary obligations require they do, and which they need to do before making a decision. If/when the BOT acts, it will come to the Board of Governors, where the Board of Governors must agree to confirm the candidate for President of UF. The BOG takes this responsibility seriously, and issues will likely be fully reviewed and discussed publicly,” FLBOG member Alan Levine wrote in a Sunday social media post before Ono was hired.
While the Board of Governors does have the power to derail Ono’s selection, members could have done so earlier—and behind closed doors—if they had concerns. Under a policy established last year, the Board of Governors must sign off on a list of presidential finalists identified by search committees before those candidates can be considered by individual boards. So the board could’ve wielded that veto power of sorts to remove Ono before he was named as a sole finalist.
If confirmed, Ono will replace interim president Kent Fuchs, who came out of retirement after then-president Ben Sasse stepped down last July, weeks before a spending scandal emerged.
Elsewhere in the state, the University of West Florida tapped former Republican lawmaker and current Florida commissioner of education Manny Diaz Jr. as its interim president in a process some trustees argued was rushed and lacked transparency. As the fifth president hired to lead a public university in Florida this year (including those serving in an interim capacity), Ono is the only one who is not either a former Republican lawmaker or connected to the governor’s office.
CLARKSDALE, Miss., Feb. 25, 2025 — After receiving widespread condemnation for obtaining a temporary restraining order that forced Mississippi’s Clarksdale Press Register to take down an editorial critical of the city, Clarksdale’s Board of Mayor and Commissioners voted Monday to drop the lawsuit.
Last week, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression first called national attention to the plight of the Press Register after the city sued the small-town Coahoma County newspaper to force it to take down an editorial criticizing local officials. On Friday, FIRE agreed to defend the Press Register, its editor, and parent company in court to have the unconstitutional restraining order lifted.
“The implications of this case go beyond one Mississippi town censoring its paper of record,” said FIRE attorney David Rubin. “If the government can get a court order silencing mere questions about its decisions, the First Amendment rights of all Americans are in jeopardy.”
By Monday, Clarksdale’s Board had convened, voted not to continue with the lawsuit, and filed a notice of voluntary dismissal with the court. That means the city’s suit is over and with it the restraining order preventing the Press Register from publishing its editorial.
“While we are relieved the city has voted to drop its vindictive lawsuit, it doesn’t unring this bell,” Rubin said. “The Press Register is exploring its options to ensure that the city refrains from blatantly unconstitutional censorship in the future.”
The controversy began when the city of Clarksdale held an impromptu meeting on Feb. 4 to discuss sending a resolution asking the state legislature to let it levy a 2% tax on products like tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana. By state law, cities must notify the media when they hold such irregular “special-called meetings,” but the Press Register did not receive any notice.
In response, the Press Register blasted the city in an editorial titled “Secrecy, Deception Erode Public Trust,” and questioned their motive for freezing out the press. “Have commissioners or the mayor gotten kick-back from the community?” the editorial asked. “Until Tuesday we had not heard of any. Maybe they just want a few nights in Jackson to lobby for this idea – at public expense.”
“For over a hundred years, the Press Register has served the people of Clarksdale by speaking the truth and printing the facts,” said Wyatt Emmerich, president of Emmerich Newspapers. “We didn’t earn the community’s trust by backing down to politicians, and we didn’t plan on starting now.”
Rather than taking their licks, the Clarksdale Board of Commissioners made a shocking move by voting to sue the Press Register, its editor and publisher Floyd Ingram, and its parent company Emmerich Newspapers for “libel.” Last Tuesday, Judge Martin granted ex parte – that is, without hearing from the PressRegister – the city’s motion for a temporary restraining order to force it to take down the editorial.
By silencing the Press Register before they could even challenge Clarksdale’s claims, Judge Martin’s ruling represented a clear example of a “prior restraint,” a serious First Amendment violation. Before the government can force the removal of any speech, the First Amendment rightly demands a determination whether it fits into one of the limited categories of unprotected speech or otherwise withstands judicial scrutiny. Otherwise, the government has carte blanche to silence speech in the days, months, or even years it takes to get a final ruling that the speech was actually protected.
Judge Martin’s decision was even more surprising given that Clarksdale’s lawsuit had several obvious and fatal flaws. Most glaringly, the government itself cannot sue citizens for libel. As the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the landmark 1964 case New York Times v. Sullivan, “no court of last resort in this country has ever held, or even suggested, that prosecutions for libel on government have any place in the American system of jurisprudence.”
But even if the Clarksdale commissioners had sued in their personal capacities, Sullivan also established that public officials have to prove not just that a newspaper made an error, but that it did so with “actual malice,” defined as “knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false.” Clarksdale’s lawsuit didn’t even attempt to prove the Press Register editorial met that standard.
Finally, libel requires a false statement of fact. But the Press Register’s broadside against city officials was an opinion piece that expressed the opinion that there could be unsavory reasons for the city’s lack of candor. The only unique statement of fact expressed in the editorial — that Clarksdale failed to meet the legal obligation to inform the media of its meeting — was confirmed by the city itself in its legal filings.
“If asking whether a politician might be corrupt was libel, virtually every American would be bankrupt,” said FIRE attorney Josh Bleisch. “For good reason, courts have long held that political speech about government officials deserves the widest latitude and the strongest protection under the First Amendment. That’s true from the White House all the way down to your local councilman.”
“If the board had grumbled and gone about their day, this whole brouhaha wouldn’t have traveled far outside our town,” said Emmerich. “But when they tried to censor us, the eyes of the nation were on Clarksdale and millions heard about our editorial. Let this be a lesson: if you try to silence one voice in America, a hundred more will take up the call.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.
CONTACT:
Alex Griswold, Communications Campaign Manager, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
Each year, I look forward to reviewing the results of Jane Hart’s Top 100 Tools for Learning and to submitting my votes for a personal Top Tools for Learning list. I haven’t quite been writing up my list every single year (missed 2020 and 2023), but I did submit a top 10 list in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022. I avoid looking at the prior year’s lists until I have identified my votes for current year.
My 2024 Top Tools for Learning
Below are my top 10 Tools for Learning for 2024. The biggest change in my learning tools involves using social media less, most specifically that service that used to have an association with a blue bird and can most closely be associated with a cesspool these days.
Overcast
This podcast catcher is a daily part of my life and learning. Overcast has key features like smart speed and voice boost, which you can have for free with some non-intrusive ad placements, or pay a small fee for a pro subscription and have them hidden from view. Overcast received a major design overhaul in March of 2022, which led me to reorganize my podcast playlists to take full advantage of the new features.
Unread
While Overcast is for the spoken word, Unread is primarily for written pieces. Powered by real simple syndication (RSS), Unread presents me headlines of unread stories across all sorts of categories, which I can tap (on my iPad) to read, or scroll past to automatically mark as read. I use Unread in conjunction with Inoreader, which is a robust RSS aggregator that can either be used as an RSS reader, as well, or can be used in conjunction with an RSS reader, such as Unread.
LinkedIn
The biggest change from prior year’s surveys has to do with social media. The bird app just isn’t like it used to be. I’ve found most of my professional learning via social media takes place on LinkedIn these days. If you’re on LinkedIn, please follow me and the Teaching in Higher Ed page.
YouTube
Once I found out that I could subscribe to new YouTube videos on my RSS reader, Inoreader, it changed how often I watch YouTube videos. That, plus subscribing to YouTube Premium, which means we get ad-free viewing as a family, makes me spending a lot more time with YouTube. I even have my own YouTube channel, which I occasionally post videos on, most recently about my course redesign and use of LiaScript.
Loom
The expression tells us that it is better to show than tell in many contexts. Loom is a simple screen casting tool. Record what’s on your screen (with or without your face included via your web cam) and as soon as you press stop, there’s a link that automatically gets copied to your computer’s clipboard which is now ready to paste anywhere you want. I use Loom for simple explanations, to have asynchronous conversations with colleagues and students, to record how-to videos, and to invite students to share what they’re learning. If you verify your Loom account as an educator, you get the pro features for free.
Kindle App
I primarily read digitally and find the Kindle iPad app to be the easiest route for reading. I read more, in total, when I am disciplined about using the Kindle hardware, but wind up grabbing my iPad most nights.
Readwise
It is so easy to highlight sections of what I’m reading on the Kindle app and have those highlights sync over to a service called Readwise. The service “makes it easy to revisit and learn from your ebook and article highlights.
Canva
My use of the graphic design website Canva has evolved over the years. I started by using it to create graphics and printable signs for classes. Now I also use it to create presentations (which can include embedded content, slides, videos, etc.). For some presentations I’m doing in the coming weeks, I’m experimenting with using Beautiful.ai for my presentations. I still think Canva is great, but am having fun trying something new.
Raindrop.io
Probably more than any other app, I use Raindrop on a daily basis. It is a digital bookmarking tool. I wrote about how I use Raindrop in late 2020. I continue to see daily benefits with having such a simple-yet-robust way of making sense of all the information coming at me on a daily basis.
Craft
I don’t change my core productivity apps very often. In the case of Craft, once I made the switch, I never looked back. This app has both date-based and topic-based note-taking, as well as individual and collaborative features. From their website: “Craft is where people go to ideate, organize, and share their best work.”
Those are my top ten for the year, not in any particular order. The first draft of this post had eleven items, since I lost count as I was going. I wind up using Zoom as so much a part of almost every day, it winds up getting forgotten, given its ubiquity in my life. I’m leaving it on this post, even though it takes me over my count of ten.
Zoom
I use Zoom so often that one of the years, I entirely left it off of my top ten listing, because it is just always there. Recent enhancements I have grown to appreciate are the built-in timer app, the AI transcripts and summaries, and that you can present slides while people are in breakout rooms.
Your Turn
Would you like to submit a vote with your Top Tools for Learning? You can fill out a form, write a blog post, or even share your picks on Twitter. The 2024 voting will continue through Friday, August 30, 2024 and the results will be posted by Monday, September 2, 2024.
On March 5, 2024, the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team voted 13-2 in favor of joining the Service Employees International Union. The election marks the first time in nearly a decade that student-athletes have been authorized to vote for union representation and may be the first case in which their election results in certified representation.
Background
On February 5, the National Labor Relations Board Regional Director Laura Sacks determined that players on the Dartmouth men’s basketball team are employees under the National Labor Relation Act and are thus eligible to unionize. The decision argues that the student-athletes are employees because Dartmouth has the “right to control the work performed by” the players on the team and players receive several benefits, including, but not limited to, lodging, meals, gear and training. Sacks’s decision ordered a secret-ballot election for representation, allowing all 15 players on the roster to determine whether or not to unionize.
On February 29, Dartmouth filed a request to the NLRB to reconsider the decision made by the regional director and to place a stay on the election or impound the ballots during the reconsideration period. The NLRB rejected these requests to reconsider the decision and stay the election, allowing the election to move forward as scheduled.
On March 5, before the 13-2 vote, Dartmouth appealed the regional director’s decision to recognize the student-athletes as employees. The appeal asked the NLRB to review and reverse the regional director’s decision and dismiss the petition, making the following arguments in favor of doing so:
The NLRB regional director inaccurately defined a student-athlete as an employee.
The NLRB regional director contradicted precedent set by a 2015 NLRB decision involving the Northwestern University men’s football team by asserting jurisdiction in this case.*
There will be several adverse and unintended consequences for institutions and players if student-athletes are found to be employees, including potential immigration and Title IX issues.
Looking Ahead
The SEIU has five days to respond to this appeal, after which the NLRB will consider both motions. The review by the NLRB, along with any further legal challenges that could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, might significantly delay the union’s official recognition and the start of collective bargaining negotiations. These processes could take months or even longer to complete.
Several lawsuits challenging NCAA policies are also ongoing, and other recent NLRB decisions and complaints further challenge the NCAA’s structure and question the classification of student-athletes as employees. Last month, a district court judge in Tennessee issued a preliminary injunction that bars the NCAA from enforcing its policy prohibiting incoming student-athletes from capitalizing on name, image, and likeness deals prior to enrolling at a college or university. Additionally, the NLRB has also issued a complaint against the University of Southern California, the PAC-12 Conference and the NCAA, alleging the three have misclassified USC’s football and men’s and women’s basketball players as student-athletes rather than employees and that they are joint employers of the athletes. The NLRB complaint is currently being challenged in court.
The establishment of a student-athlete union is a divergence from the NCAA’s amateurism standards; for example, unionized players gain opportunities to negotiate compensation and working conditions related to practice hours and travel. With unionized players empowered to negotiate, the landscape of collegiate athletics may undergo a significant shift.
CUPA-HR will keep members apprised of upcoming developments as it relates to this case.
*In 2015, the NLRB declined to assert jurisdiction in a case involving the Northwestern University men’s football team. Prior to issuing the decision, the men’s football team had voted for representation, but the NLRB ultimately dismissed the petition filed by the union that planned to represent the unit. The NLRB held that, though Northwestern is a private institution, it is a part of the Big Ten Conference, which was comprised of all public schools except for Northwestern at the time.
