Higher education
Academia can no longer ignore its systemic inter-generational inequality
From job markets, to housing prices, to shifting quality standards, academia is arranged in a way that benefits senior faculty to the detriment of early career researchers argues Kyle Siler. In the 2022 book Generation Gap, political scientist Kevin Munger chronicled the continuing dominance of the baby boomer generation in the leadership and control of … Continued
The Texas Attack on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Higher Education
Texas legislature has made it clear that Texas institutions of higher education—and, by extension, the state itself—are not welcoming to people of color, queer and trans people, and undocumented immigrants. ...
Academic Freedom, State Legislatures and Public Universities (Wisconsin edition).
Gina’s post on Indiana’s DEI-related law came at a fortuitous time for me, because last week I participated in a panel about State Legislatures, Academic Freedom and Public Universities. The panelists were given about 6 minutes to present some prepared remarks’ and discussion ensued. As far as I could tell there was just one state legislator present, and one administrator; otherwise the audience was students, faculty, and members of the public.
I did write out my remarks, but then I didn’t say exactly what I wrote, so below the fold is an attempt at a rough transcription of what I actually said:
The event that prompted this discussion is the deal that the UW-Madison and Universities of Wisconsin leadership did with the legislature back in December. The legislature took the unusual step of withholding additional funding unless the universities met certain conditions: including capping DEI programming and moving some DEI roles to student success roles [1].
In fact, the deal doesn’t really involve academic freedom as it is usually understood.[2] We normally understand academic freedom fairly minimally, as protecting the ability of researchers to pursue research through their disciplines; and to protect the authority of faculty and instructional staff over curricular and instructional matters. And even then; academic freedom only protects instructional and curricular practices that fall within a certain range: an instructor who gratuitously insults the religious or cultural background of their student cannot usually claim academic freedom as a protection, let alone as a justification. Anyway, non-academic programming is not usually covered.
Step back a moment from the particulars that the legislature was trying to get us to do and stop doing. Should the legislature have any say over how we conduct ourselves?
It inevitably does. We’re a public institution. And the legislature holds some of the purse strings. So it is free to decide not to increase, or even to decrease, our funding, without offering any reasons at all, and without offering us deals.
Being a public institution we should welcome some degree of public accountability. That’s what makes us different from private institutions. And UW-Madison (like other state flagships) is a peculiar kind of public institution. We accept public funding that comes from taxation, and yet we also charge residents substantial tuition fees, and we routinely reject residents who want to attend (and many residents who would like to attend don’t even apply, because they either see tuition as too much of a barrier or because they know they’ll be rejected anyway). Most residents of the state are ineligible for any direct benefits from the university.
An institution like that has a particular duty to be accountable to the public; the public has to be assured that we are fulfilling a mission to serve the whole state, even though we manifestly refuse directly to serve some residents.
So what does accountability to the public mean? The most legitimate representatives of the public are the people they elect to office. As I said, they hold the purse strings, so in a sense we just are accountable to them, whether we like it or not. I do agree with people who would prefer that the legislature wouldn’t meddle too much. And we already have an appointed Board of Regents that (rightly) plays a role in holding us accountable. But public institutions work best when public servants are inclined to, and skilled at, holding themselves accountable to the public: when they are alert to the possibility of public complaint and distrust, conscientious about identifying when complaints and distrust have real grounds, and addressing those grounds. We have to think about what that means for us in a world in which the legislature – and, frankly, the public – is often at odds with us.
There are two ways of seeing last year’s dispute, and I see it both ways.
First there’s a degree of unseriousness from the legislators. Like politicians generally they are not always acting fully in good faith, but are thinking, (as all politicians do) about how their moves play to their base and the people who fund their campaigns. Not all of them are always thinking about the good of the university or even about the good of the public.
The second way of seeing it is that there is a genuine problem of trust in very polarized political conditions and in which the political composition of a public institution is so different from the political composition of the people who live in the state. Its easy to pretend to ourselves that there is no problem because, as we know, the exceptional level of gerrymandering that the legislature has engaged in means that the legislature is not, actually, as representative of the public as it would be in a more sensible – dare I say a more democratic – electoral system. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves. Personally I’m pretty convinced by Kathy Cramer’s work, as well as the survey data that Russ already presented, and from numerous conversations with numerous students, that there really is a pretty serious trust problem with the public, and not just with the legislature.[2] Having a faculty is so politically homogeneous in such a politically diverse, and polarized, state is intrinsically risky. It’s intellectually risky just because the more homogeneous faculty are on any given dimension the more likely it is that they will have collective blind spots about both good and bad ideas. It’s politically risky because it is too easy for us to be complacent about our practice, and too easy for the public (and our students) to distrust us.
Personally what I’d most like to get out of this discussion are ideas about how to mitigate the lack of trust – if you like, how to undercut the position of political entrepreneurs like Robin Voss – and, more abstractly, ideas about what it really means for us to be accountable to the public.
[1] Because some of what falls under DEI used to be considered ‘student success’, the latter part effectively meant renaming some roles.
[2] There is one part of the deal that might pertain to academic freedom – the agreement that the University should seek funding for a position for which it would hire a scholar who studies conservative thought, but this was not the focus of the panel.
[3] Russ, the moderator, had reported various data including evidence from the Pew surveys showing the precipitous drop in public trust in higher education over the past several years, especially among Republicans.
As News Deserts Expand, Student Journalists Step Up
On the drizzly first Tuesday in March, voters crammed into a historic white clapboard meeting house on a hill in Stockbridge, Vermont. It was Town Meeting Day, when Vermonters across the state gather to debate and vote on local government. And the election for the next member of Stockbridge’s three-person select board, the main governing body of this town of just over 700 people, had drawn record turnout.
As voters waited to cast handwritten ballots in a long queue that snaked around wooden benches, University of Vermont sophomore Sarah Andrews approached locals, notebook in hand. Andrews and two classmates were not just there for course work: They were there as part of UVM’s Community News Service, reporting for the White River Valley Herald, the weekly newspaper that covers 16 towns in this rural region.
Small newspapers like the Herald have long been the main way of recording and distributing information about community happenings. But local news outlets are disappearing. The 2023 State of Local News report found that about half of all counties across the country have only one local news outlet, and more than 200 counties have none.
UVM student reporters covered an unusually busy Town Meeting Day in the small town of Stockbridge. Credit: Elizabeth Hewitt
As local news deserts grow, universities are stepping in. With initiatives ranging from student-staffed statehouse bureaus to newspapers run by journalism schools, these academic-media partnerships are bolstering local news.
“It’s a short-term win and it’s a long-term win,” says Penny Muse Abernathy, a visiting professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, and co-author of the local news report.
University-media partnerships provide reliable local news coverage in communities where it is needed. In the process, students get hands-on experience with community decision-making in a way that shapes their careers and worldviews going forward.
Credit: Elizabeth Hewitt
Sarah Andrews and two of her classmates covered Town Meeting Day for the White River Valley Herald, the weekly newspaper that covers 16 communities in Vermont’s rural Upper Valley region.
“Too often over the last 20 years, we’ve tended to focus on teaching students what we assume are professional digital skills for the digital age, when in fact journalism at its core teaches not only the journalist but the citizen how to employ critical thinking and make wise decisions,” says Abernathy.
Closures of smaller news outlets over the last several decades have left many regions without reliable media coverage. Since 2005, the number of newspapers in the US has dropped by a third, and the number of journalists has declined by 60 percent. The erosion of local news makes it harder for community members to be aware of the issues in their regions.
“Most of the decisions that affect our immediate everyday life occur at the local level,” says Abernathy.
Through university-led journalism programs, students — under the tutelage and editorial supervision of faculty members — are stepping in to fill in some of those gaps. The model isn’t new: The University of Missouri has been practicing a “teaching hospital” approach that involves students in community news coverage since 1908. Now, in the current media landscape, higher education institutions are looking at how they can both offer students enriching experiences and contribute to communities, according to Richard Watts, who heads the University of Vermont’s Center for Community News.
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“Students like to do things that are real,” he says. “There’s a sense of agency about writing real stories that real people read and make a real difference.”
There are about 120 such programs at colleges and universities across the country, according to Watts. The Center for Community News found in 2023 that over the last year, more than 2,000 student journalists across the US had produced more than 10,000 news stories that were published in community outlets. The stories were estimated to reach more than 14 million people.
Often offered to students in the forms of classes, the programs require a high level of commitment from faculty members — editing stories for publication is more intensive than typical grading. Across different regions, the scope and focus of programs varies, says Watts.
Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication has taken advantage of its location a few miles away from the State Capitol to bolster coverage of the legislature.
News coverage of state policy-making is among the casualties of the erosion of local news. Across the country, the number of reporters covering statehouses full-time declined by 34 percent between 2014 and 2022.
Claire Sullivan has been an LSU Manship School Statehouse reporter for both the 2023 and the 2024 sessions. Credit: Ria Salway
As press coverage of the Louisiana legislature diminished, LSU launched a statehouse bureau in 2016. Through a high-level journalism class, student reporters cover committee meetings and floor proceedings. Grant funding allows the program to keep students on as interns to cover the weeks of the legislative session after the semester ends. Christopher Drew, a former New York Times investigative reporter and editor who heads the bureau program, edits the stories. Then they’re made available for any news outlet to publish for free.
Ninety-five outlets have run LSU student statehouse stories, ranging from some of the state’s largest newspapers to small weekly and bi-weekly papers, many of which Drew says wouldn’t have another option to get stories about news from the statehouse.“Our students never have any problem getting taken seriously by lawmakers because we often are the hometown reporter for the lawmakers,” says Drew. “A lot of them come from places [where] the only thing that constituents could read about what they do comes from what the LSU students do.”
The idea is spreading; 20 states have some form of university-led statehouse bureau, and Drew is involved in conversations with schools interested in launching programs in additional states. LSU also offers an investigative journalism course, focused on civil rights era cold cases, which similarly distributes stories to outlets. Drew is working on a new project that would create a network of universities and colleges around Louisiana, partnering journalism programs with small local news outlets.
LSU senior Claire Sullivan is taking the statehouse course for the second time this spring. She sees the community news model as mutually beneficial for students like herself who want experience and local news outlets that want coverage.
“It’s the best kind of motivator,” says Sullivan. “You want to do your best job for the local outlets.”
Devon Sanders, an LSU Manship School Statehouse reporter, interviewed State Representative Katrina Jackson in 2018. Credit: Katherine Seghers / LSU
The Oglethorpe Echo has been covering the issues of Oglethorpe County in northeastern Georgia since 1874. The weekly was poised to shut down in 2021, when the long-time publisher was ready to retire. Instead, a community member hatched a plan for the local paper to be taken over by the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Over the last two and a half years, students have reported the stories that fill the Echo’s pages. During fall and spring semesters, the newspaper is staffed by students in a senior capstone class. Over summer and winter breaks, students are hired as interns, so there’s no break in news coverage. The paper was converted to a nonprofit, and Andy Johnston, a longtime sports journalist who had been an adjunct professor, came on as the paper’s editor.
Student journalists have dug into issues related to limited rural broadband access, and use of a particular form of fertilizer on local farms. In its first full year of operating under the university, the paper won nine awards from the Georgia Press Association.
Courtesy of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
The Oglethorpe Echo nearly shut down in 2021. Instead, the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication took over the paper. Now, student stories fill its pages.
One difference between university-led media and traditional local outlets is that student reporters turn over frequently, so they don’t have the long-term knowledge and relationships that a professional reporter would. But editors — both employed by universities and with community news outlets — help provide that expertise. In Vermont, when the White River Valley Herald picks up stories written by UVM students, editor Tim Calabro says he occasionally adds in local context that students don’t know.
When the University of Georgia took over the Echo, Johnston says there was an adjustment period of building trust with the community. The university is located about 25 miles west of Oglethorpe County, so students don’t live locally. But the feedback he gets is generally positive. Readers appreciate having a local news source, and they particularly like slice-of-life stories that feature their friends and family members.
“We’re writing to tell the stories of the community, tell the stories of the county,” he says.
Current Echo students Michael Johnson (left) and Izzy Wagner read through a copy of The Oglethorpe Echo. Courtesy of Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication
Back in Vermont, on Town Meeting Day, a total of 139 people voted in the election for Stockbridge’s new select board member. Two days later, Andrews’ story about the election ran in the White River Valley Herald.
For the Herald’s editor, Tim Calabro, UVM students’ stories helped his limited staff cover news around the region on the biggest single day for local government of the year. But Calabro says there are broader benefits of the program beyond filling the paper with news.
“Of all the dangers that newspapers, news organizations of any stripe are facing, the biggest worry is that people just won’t care about what’s going on in their communities,” Calabro says.
Not every student who goes through a university-led news program will go on to a career in journalism, he says. But even for those without ambitions in journalism, he sees this kind of program as valuable for engaging young people in communities: “Being a human being in society,” as Calabro puts it, “it’s good to care about society.”
The post As News Deserts Expand, Student Journalists Step Up appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
Compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment – why women do more academic service work
Drawing on qualitative data and CV evidence Margaretha Järvinen and Nanna Mik-Meyer explore the gendered nature of academic service work and highlight how different expectations and strategies affect the workloads and career prospects of academic women. Academic service consists of all the activities, other than teaching and research, oriented to the needs of a university … Continued
Elite Capture and Racial Capital, from the University to Palestine
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and author of Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (and Everything Else), joined Cresa Pugh and Julie Beth Napolin at The New School in December 2023, for a conversation on racial capital in university life, the New School strike, protesting for justice in Palestine, and the possibility of political organizing across identity differences....
Should the generative AI scholar be fast or slow?
Across all disciplines norms are being established around the role of generative AI in research. Discussing a recent LSE Impact Blogpost on academic responses to AI, Eric A. Jensen suggests that clear, practical guidance needs to be developed by specific research associations and institutions. Large language models (LLMs) have already altered the landscape of academic … Continued
The Cyclopes in the Food Court
As chair of liberal arts at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute, every autumn orientation I tell the incoming students this tale of Cyclopean narrow-mindedness in order to plant a memorable image in their minds of what to avoid....
It Was Supposed to Make Getting College Aid Simpler. It Hasn’t.
Experts speaking at a recent webinar co-hosted by Immigrants Rising stated the FAFSA is “absolutely not working” for mixed-status families. “We’re talking about millions of individuals who are college-age,” noted the organization’s director of higher education....
What’s wrong with free public college?
My paper with Kailey Mullane on what’s wrong with free public college has been published in Educational Theory, open access so anybody who wants to can read it. Obsessive readers of CT (are there any?) will know that I’ve had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the issue for quite a while, and the arguments we’ve had here helped me and Kailey refine our views and develop the paper. What we did in the end was look at and analyze a hybrid of the Warren and Sanders proposals from the 2020 primary, evaluating it against two relatively simple normative criteria – equity (which we explain) and whether it would raise the average level of educational outcomes across the population. (Later in the paper we consider other values that might also be relevant).
Free public college might sound great if you ignore the cost and compare it with what we have now. But given the way public higher education is actually funded currently, and given the persistent patterns of enrollment (and even on very optimistic assumptions about how those patterns would change if public college were free), for various structural reasons almost none of the new spending would be on students from the bottom 50% of the income distribution and most of it on students in the top 25% of the income distribution. Some people (here) have defended this by saying that under these plans the funds would all come from taxes on the super rich. Even if you believe that, mightn’t there better feasible alternative ways of spending those funds in education? We compare the proposal with i) spending those funds in k-12 (which, unlike higher education, is a universal program) and ii) spending the funds on expanding the Pell Grant program (a very popular and successful program for supporting lower income students). Either of those will be much more equitable (in any reasonable sense) ways of spending the money, and will probably (there’s a caveat to this that you can see in the paper) in raising the average level of educational outcomes.
I can’t speak for Kailey, but I was (naively) a bit shocked when reading the Warren and Sanders proposals how thin and lacking in detail they were, and how clear it was that they had not consulted anyone who knew anything about higher education funding as it currently works. For example, they seem not to understand within each state public colleges and universities are unequally funded, with much more government funding per student going to institutions attended by more affluent students, and much less to those attended by less affluent students; they also seemed not to understand that low income students usually pay very low rates of tuition at the institutions they attend: for those students the financial barrier to college is not, usually, tuition, but living expenses, which eliminating tuition does nothing about at all. Sanders’s requirement that states participating in the free public college not spend any more money on administrators, if it is serious as opposed to crowd-pleasing, reveals that he doesn’t know what administrators do (or what “administrators” means). As things stand the US government (all sources) spend about 30-40% more per student/year in higher education than in k-12, and both candidates (considering their overall education policy offer) were proposing to increase that differential considerably. When I pointed this out to my dad, who was a veteran observer of ill-considered political decisions, he said “That’s not really what they care about. It’s just that nobody in their campaigns has bothered to do the calculation that you have done”.
Because discussions here at CT have had such an influence on my own thinking, I thought some of you might be interested in reading the whole thing so here’s the paper. Please share it with your friends, and feel free to comment!