Teaching and Learning
New Data Shows Attendance Fosters Student Success (Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed, June 13, 2025): Faculty say attendance is known to promote learning and improve student outcomes. Students say they want more flexibility to manage outside pressures.
How Do You Teach the Hidden Curriculum? (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2025): How to explain all the things colleges assume you know but are not obvious to many people?
Context, Context, Context (Tony’s Teaching Tips, June 11, 2025): An invaluable service instructors can provide is to spend a tiny amount of time re-orienting students whenever they start the next step of their learning process, and explain how it fits into the bigger picture of their progress toward the course topic.
Academic Freedom, DEI, Admissions, and Speech
A Professor Was Fired for Her Politics. Is That the Future of Academia? (Sarah Viren, New York Times Magazine, June 6, 2025): Maura Finkelstein is one of many scholars discovering that the traditional protections of academic freedom are no longer holding.
Universities in the Crosshairs
In Public, Harvard Is Fighting Trump. Quietly, It’s Dismantling a Program the White House Doesn’t Like (Francie Diep, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9, 2025): Harvard is not renewing the contracts for the five remaining staff members of the Religion and Public Life Program.
International Students and Scholars
Fulbright Board Resigns After Accusing Trump Aides of Political Interference (Edward Wong, New York Times, June 11, 2025): The board of the prestigious program told the State Department it had no right to cancel scholarships for nearly 200 American professors and researchers.
International Students by the Numbers (Inside Higher Ed, June 11, 2025): How much impact do international students have on American colleges and universities? Inside Higher Ed illustrates their influence in five key graphics.
US State Department Orders Embassies to Resume Processing Harvard Student Visas (Kylie Atwood, CNN, June 9, 2025): The new guidance replaced one that posts had received earlier that same week – calling on them to refuse visa applicants for students and researchers going to Harvard – due to the temporary restraining order (TRO) issued by US District Judge Allison Burroughs.
Federal Judge Blocks ICE from Detaining Columbia University Student (Joanna Slater, Susan Svrluga, and Shayna Jacobs, Washington Post, June 5, 2025): Yunseo Chung, a U.S. permanent resident, is one of several students whom ICE has sought to arrest and deport for pro-Palestinian activism.
Extra Credit Reading
Small Colleges Are Banding Together Against a Higher Endowment Tax. This Is Why (Sarah Huddleston, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2025): These liberal-arts institutions rely on their endowments to fund much of their operations and financial aid.
Future Imperfect
Funding for Hispanic-Serving Institutions Is Discriminatory and Unconstitutional, Lawsuit Argues (Jasper Smith, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 11, 2025): More than 600 colleges qualify for the money. Conservatives say it incentivizes discriminatory recruitment practices.
Preserving the Federal Data Trump Is Trying to Purge (Kathryn Palmer, Inside Higher Ed, June 10, 2025): For months, the research community has been racing to download and store thousands of demographic data sets the government wants to delete because they don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideological views.
In Texas, University Presidents May Soon Control Faculty Senates (Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2025): A bill awaiting Gov. Abbott’s signature would require college administrators to set procedures for faculty governing bodies and appoint their leaders, part of an effort to address “liberal faculty control over universities.”
Trump Ends Vital Higher Ed Data System Training (Jessica Blake, Inside Higher Ed, June 9, 2025): Led by the Association of Institutional Research, the professional development resources helped to ensure the availability of accurate public data on colleges and universities, higher ed experts say.
Future Conferences
AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium (Connecticut College, October 17-19, 2025): Visit their website for more detailed information and to submit proposals.
Have a short article or some news related to teaching and learning at your institution that you’d like to share with colleagues? Send your contribution along to us. Also, please email Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org) if you have colleagues who would like to receive this weekly report.
Steven Volk (steven.volk@oberlin.edu), Editor
GLCA/GLAA Consortium for Teaching and Learning
Co-Directors:
Lew Ludwig (ludwigl@denison.edu)
Colleen Monahan Smith (smith@glca.org)