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Blog:  Higher Ed Gamma When I was a junior faculty member, I considered the word  professiona l one of those value-laden terms that could be invoked to disparage anyone who didn’t fit in. To criticize someone as unprofessional struck me as a much too easy way to attack colleagues on the basis of their ideas, demeanor, or even their appearance.  As I’ve grown older, my position has changed.  I’ve grown more sensitive to the ways that faculty can abuse their professional status: not only to bully, harass, and intimidate, but to justify virtually anything they might say or do. I now believe there is a right to expect professionalism among our colleagues – even though that concept’s meaning isn’t crystal clear or self-evident. I much enjoyed Jonathan Zimmerman’s recent  Inside Higher Ed essay  entitled “ My Amy Wax Problem ,” which I consider among the most insightful, thoughtful, and balanced arguments I’ve read on the limits to free speech in the academy.   His argument --

Blog:  Learning Innovation Ten inconsistent ways that I’m thinking about academic work: 1 - I want everyone to be around on campus for casual chats and unscheduled run-ins, yet I’m flexibly working from home sometimes with no set schedule. 2 - When colleagues are on campus, I want to be able to come to their offices for unscheduled conversations. At the same time, much of my on-campus time is spent with my door closed and on Zoom meetings. 3 - At the end of each day, I find myself exhausted from Zoom meetings and missing the energy you get from being with smart people in a room. And yet, most of the meetings that I schedule are on Zoom. 4 - I firmly believe that talent is widely geographically distributed and that we can get the best people to work at our institutions if we are pro remote work. At the same time, I’m not sure what a critical mass of remote colleagues does to the culture of our residential campuses, and I worry about fully integrating and retaining remot

Blog:  University of Venus Higher education is a culture laden with deeply rooted values - knowledge, lifelong learning, discovery, social and technological contribution, and excellence. But it can also be a culture of overwork, competition, toxic productivity, and exploitation, especially in the case of contingent labor.  Values matter, even though we might not think about them consciously very much. For me pre-burnout, I had fully bought into the less attractive higher ed values - the competition, productivity, expectation escalation - and they ran my life, not just my work. The work I did to come out of burnout helped me realign my priorities and begin to rebuild my life and work around the values of purpose, compassion, connection, and balance.  I regularly talk about values with my guests on my podcast, the agile academic . Something about the act of voicing your values brings a sense of clarity to whether or not your actions and goals align with those values - or if th

A coalition of over 100 congressional Democrats called on President Biden in a letter sent Thursday to extend the pause on student loan payments that is set to expire Aug. 31. For over two years, payments have been paused for the 45 million borrowers with outstanding federal student loan debt. During this time, more than 60 percent of borrowers have not made a single payment. “This much needed pause has helped many borrowers to keep a roof over their heads, secure childcare, and purchase food, health care, and medicine during the course of a pandemic responsible for the deaths of more than 1 million people in the U.S.,” the letter said. The letter noted that costs of food, housing, health care and childcare have risen throughout the last two years. They wrote that resuming student loan payments would put many borrowers at risk to choose between paying for necessities or their debt. Recent reporting shows that student loan servicers have been told by the Education Department t

Multiple higher education institutions in Mississippi and Alabama received bomb threats this week. Hinds Community College Nursing and Allied Health Center in Jackson, Miss., received a threat Thursday morning, WAPT news reported. Mississippi State University, William Carey University, Meridian Community College and three Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College campuses all received threats yesterday as well, WLOX news reported. A news release from Mississippi State University also mentioned that Alcorn State University, a historically Black land-grant institution, and Itawamba Community College also received threats Thursday. All the campuses have reportedly issued all-clear messages, and no bombs were found. These incidents follow at least 13 threats to colleges and universities in Alabama on Wednesday, including the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the University of South Alabama, Wallace Community College, Calhoun Community College, Auburn University, Reid State Techn

Eastern Gateway Community College is not permitted to disburse Pell Grants to new students accepted for enrollment in its free online program for union members this fall, according to a U.S. Education Department spokesperson. This news comes days after Eastern Gateway reported that it could enroll students and just over one week after the Education Department told the institution to stop enrolling students. At the heart of the matter is a July 18 letter the Education Department sent to Eastern Gateway indicating that the college had violated federal financial aid rules by using some students’ Pell Grant funds to essentially subsidize the enrollment of other students who do not qualify for federal aid. Eastern Gateway said in a  press release  on its website that it would adhere to the latest suspension. “After thorough discussion with college legal counsel and the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, the college has concluded that it is in the best interest of EGCC to move forward o

Starting July 16, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline became more easily reachable—simply by dialing 988 . With mental health crises burdening so many, this is a welcome step. Robust and effective suicide prevention starts with early intervention through timely and easy access to mental health care. For college students burdened and struggling, including nontraditional students who commute to campus and in many cases have work and parenting responsibilities, what’s readily available on campus is critical. Crafting the minds of tomorrow is job No. 1 for our colleges and universities. But we are expecting today’s college students to succeed academically while ignoring their critical mental and emotional health needs. Last year, Congress increased funding for mental health support for youth through the Garrett Lee Smith (GLS) Memorial Act Youth Suicide Prevention Program but kept the funding for higher education within the GLS Campus Grants at $6.488 million, the same amount allo

With so many depressing news stories these days about an apparently unrelenting cancel culture in American higher education, it is important to take note of the occasional win. To wit: the University of Michigan Medical School just took a bold stand for academic freedom and speech. Dr. Kristin Collier is an assistant professor of medicine at Michigan, where she directs the Program in Health, Spirituality and Religion. A productive and innovative scholar and popular instructor, Dr. Collier was selected by the medical school’s Gold Humanism Honor Society to give the keynote address at this year’s annual White Coat Ceremony on July 24 for incoming medical students. It was a feather in Dr. Collier’s cap bestowed by medical school honor society students through a democratic process of nomination and voting, and she was happy to accept. Alas, it wasn’t long before the mob formed, demanding Dr. Collier’s cancellation for her pro-life views. Not even medical schools are immune from can

Before the nationwide pause on federal student loan payments, one-third of the nation’s nearly 43.4 million borrowers in repayment before the start of the pandemic had defaulted at some point. Of those borrowers, 46 percent were Black. Default is common, but little is known about the experiences of these borrowers who enter default. A new study released by New America Wednesday provides a snapshot into the realities of student loan default. Default is when a borrower misses 270 days of payments and is punished with financial penalties like high collection fees, having their tax refunds garnished and the possibility to have federal benefits withheld. Default disproportionately impacts low-income, low-wealth and Black, Latino and Native American borrowers. These groups have also been hit the hardest by financial hardship from the COVID-19 pandemic and could be at the highest risk to enter default once repayment begins again. The study surveyed over 1,600 borrowers in 2021 and foun

The Senate passed a $280 billion bill that will provide additional funding for scientific research focused on increasing the United States’ domestic capacity to produce semiconductor chips. The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors and Science Act of 2022, better known as the CHIPS Act, was approved in a 64-to-33 vote in the Senate Wednesday. The bill is expected to pass swiftly in the House of Representatives. “This legislation is an important step toward maintaining America’s scientific leadership on an increasingly competitive global stage,” said Barbara Snyder, president of the Association of American Universities, which represents the nation’s top private research universities. The bill provides $52.7 billion to semiconductor companies to develop infrastructure and research projects in the U.S. The bill will also authorize $200 billion in science and technology research across many government agencies for the next few years and prohibit colleges from entering

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit has upheld a district court’s ruling against a suit by the College of the Ozarks because the college “lacked standing to establish a case or controversy.” The college sought an injunction to preserve its right to require students to abide by the belief that students’ biological sex is “God-given, objective gender, whether or not it differs from their internal sense of ‘gender identity.’” The college also says that “sexual relations are for the purpose of the procreation of human life and the uniting and strengthening of the marital bond in self-giving love, purposes that are to be achieved solely through heterosexual relationships in marriage.” The college also requires that male and female students on campus not mix in dormitories. The injunction would have been against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which issued a memorandum on the enforcement of various laws. “This theory of injury fails because it is based on

I was the first in my family to go to college. The oldest child of an immigrant family, I worked since I was 11. I was 17 when I started at the University of Maryland, where I was a commuter student. I relied on a caring adviser and friends whose siblings and parents had been to college to help show me things like how to apply, how to register for classes and where The Dairy was to get ice cream in the afternoon. I benefited from the knowledge of my friends, a good high school that prepared me well and having an extroverted personality. But like so many first-generation college students, I struggled because there were things I didn’t know. I was unaware of how scholarships and grants worked and what college fees meant other than I had to pay them. I bought all my textbooks brand-new, believing, as Rodney Dangerfield said, that it was better not to buy something that had already been read. I am nearly finished paying off my student loans, which I wear as a badge of honor and witho

Blog:  Just Visiting Regular readers will know that I am not often a font of optimism when it comes to the state of higher education, but I have been digging into the recently released “Varying Degrees 2022” report from the education shop at New America, and I’m seeing some heartening data . There is far too much in the report to do it justice in a single blog post, but I want to acknowledge the breadth and depth of what’s there for examination and thank New America for both putting together an accessible overview and providing all of the underlying data for others to make use of. There’s a lot of different ways to slice the data if you’re looking for evidence of positive or negative public sentiments towards higher education, but the once and (who knows?) future market researcher and communications strategist in me is particularly interested in a pair of questions. Q: Overall, do you think colleges and universities are having a positive or negative effect on the way thing