Teaching and Learning
A Gen Ed Success Guide for Students Helps Academic Achievement (Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2025): The University of Louisville developed a digital textbook to address the hidden curriculum of higher education and prepare learners to excel in their oral communication courses.
Recapturing the Fun of Teaching (Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2025): Supiano describes a faculty-development program focused on joy.
Empowering Higher Education Through Mentorship (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2025): What if we could combine the best of both worlds: mentors who lead undergraduates in communities of inquiry and a discipline-based, career-focused education?
Motivational Force: Building a Foundation for Student Success (Juli S. Charkes, Faculty Focus, February 17, 2025): A discussion of some motivational practices that can promote the type of persistence needed to “make it to the finish line.”
Against “Efficiency” (Emily Pitts Donahoe, Unmaking the Grade/Substack, February 14, 2025): Pitts Donahoe discusses a Mississippi bill framed as “An Act to Enact the “Requiring Efficiency for Our Colleges and University System (Refocus) Act.” You probably already know everything about his bill just by reading its (hardly efficient) title.
How to Encourage Students to Write Without AI (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 13, 2025): McMurtrie summarizes the approach of a faculty member who radically changed her assignments and her thinking about what she wants her students to learn.
What Keeps Stressed-Out Faculty Members Going? Their Students (Beth McMurtrie, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 10, 2025): Professors like teaching. It’s all the other stuff that’s burning them out.
All Things AI
Thinking Out Loud with AI (Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed, February 19, 2025): What the newest developments in artificial intelligence mean for faculty, staff and administrators.
Why Should Faculty Bother with AI? (Rachel Toor, Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2025): José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson, authors of Teaching with AI, answer questions about AI’s uses, abuses and future in the classroom.
Q&A: Kahn Academy’s Kristen DiCerbo on the Promise & Limits of AI in Schools – and How It Could Spark a New Era of ‘Conversational’ Testing (Greg Toppo, The 74, February 18, 2025: Khan’s chief learning officer says AI isn’t education’s ‘golden ticket,’ but can be ‘an important tool in the toolbox’ in improving student outcomes.
AI Has Gone MAGA (Zach Justus and Nik Jones, Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2025): The authors ask what AI’s growing links to Trump and MAGA mean for higher ed. [You might want to read alongside Musk Staff Propose Bigger Role for A.I. in Education Department (Dana Goldstein and Zach Montague, New York Times, February 13, 2025): The idea comes from staffers with ties to the tech industry as they push further into the agency’s work.]
Affirmative Action and DEI
Ed Blum Takes a Victory Lap (Liam Knox, Inside Higher Ed, February 19, 2025): The architect of the affirmative action ban got everything he wanted, first from the Supreme Court, then from the Trump administration. He’s still not satisfied. He’s particularly interested in selective colleges that reported similar or higher rates of Black and Hispanic enrollment this year, such as Yale, Duke and Princeton—a sure sign, he believes, that they’ve been “cheating.”
Ohio Senate Passes Bill to Ban DEI and Faculty Strikes at Public Colleges (Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive, February 13, 2025): The legislation would also establish post-tenure reviews and require all instructors to share their contact information and syllabi publicly.
Academic Freedom and Speech on Campus
Trump Wants to Destroy Higher Education (John Warner, Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2025): Trying to make your institution a smaller target isn’t going to work.
A SLAPP to the Heart of Academic Freedom (Reinhold Martin, Inside Higher Ed, February 20, 2025): Strategic lawsuits against public participation can threaten academic freedom.
University Leaders Must Actively Defend Faculty’s Freedoms (Jackie Pedota, University World News, February 19, 2025): Their research has found that the mere threat of restrictive legislation has prompted faculty members to remove course materials, alter their research dissemination and withdraw from public discourse despite rights and protections afforded under academic freedom.
This College President Isn’t Afraid of Donald Trump (Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post, February 18, 2025): Wesleyan University’s president is advocating for values in higher education while others stay silent.
Now Is Not the Time to Be Neutral (Brian Soucek, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2025): The AAUP’s new statement recognizes that academic freedom is in peril. And a contrary article, Can Academic Freedom Survive the AAUP? (Tom Ginsburg, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2025): The organization’s new policies imperil the sector they’re supposed to protect.
Institutional Neutrality is Censorship by Another Name (Bradford Vivian, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 12, 2025): Its recent vogue owes much to conservative think tanks.
Academic Freedom and Civil Discourse in Higher Education (AAC&U Research Report): Presents the results of a national survey of faculty perceptions and experiences related to academic freedom and civil discourse in higher education. Free download here.
Education Policy in the New Administration
After Sweeping Anti-DEI Guidance, What Should Colleges Do? (Liam Knox, Inside Higher Ed, February 18, 2025): The Education Department issued a surprise letter over the weekend vastly expanding the scope of the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ban. As the dust settles, institutions must decide how to respond—and whether to fight back.
Hitting Pause on the ‘Dear Colleague’ Letter (Liliana Garces, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2025): The Department of Education is overstepping its bounds and infringing on constitutional rights.
Education Dept. Gives Schools Two Weeks to Eliminate Race-Based Programs (Zach Montague, New York Times, February 17, 2025): On Monday, the department said it had also canceled $600 million in grants focused on training teachers in “inappropriate and unnecessary topics” such as critical race theory, social justice activism, antiracism and “instruction on white privilege.”
Education Department Letter Threatens Federal Funding of Any School That Considers Race in Most Aspects of Student Life (Aileen Graef and Isabelle D’Antonio, February 16, 2025): The new interpretation, which applies to all educational institutions, could open a wide range of challenges to courses and literature taught in schools, scholarships for non-white students, and various student organizations, including Black fraternities and sororities. The new policy would prohibit schools from using students’ “personal essays, writing samples, participation in extracurriculars, or other cues as a means of determining or predicting a student’s race and favoring or disfavoring such students.”
Education Department Cancels Another $350M in Contracts, Grants (Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed, February 17, 2025): The cancellations came after anti-DEI activist Christopher Rufo posted on social media about the programs.
Trump Wants to Destroy All Academia, Not Just the Woke Parts (Michelle Goldberg, New York Times, February 14, 2025): “I think the extremely strong desire is to just punish universities however possible,” said Kevin Carey, the director of the education policy program at New America, a public policy think tank. “It’s not based on any kind of coherent policy agenda. It’s just a desire to inflict pain.”
At McMahon’s Confirmation Hearing, It Was the Education Department on Trial (Cory Turner and Jonaki Mehta, NPR, February 13, 2025): In a confirmation hearing that was heated at times, and interrupted repeatedly by the shouts of protesters, McMahon was grilled by committee Democrats about the White House’s plans to dismantle the department.
Is Trump Gutting Education Research a New Beginning or Just ‘Slashing & Burning’? (Greg Toppo, The 74, February 11, 2025): “It’s apocalyptic, is all I can say,” said the director of one federal office.
“Trump May Wish to Abolish the Past. We Historians Will Not” (David W. Blight, James Grossman, and Beth English, The New Republic, February 6, 2025): A biting critique of Trump’s “Ending Radical Indoctrination” executive order, which “violates every instinct, every principle, indeed nearly every method of research and thinking that historians have practiced for at least a century.”
A New Kind of Crisis for American Universities (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, February 10, 2025): The post–World War II system of big research universities funded heavily by the government may be ending.
Extra Credit Reading
Why Are Campuses Quiet and College Leaders Silent When U.S. Democracy Is in Crisis? (Austin Sarat, Inside Higher Ed, February 17, 2025): The stakes are too high for higher ed to stay out of the fray.
The Perils of Universities’ Unscholarly Antisemitism Reports (Peter Beinart, Jewish Currents, February 14, 2025): By relying on pro-Israel organizations’ analysis of antisemitism—rather than recruiting the scholars on their own campuses—university antisemitism task forces are enabling the assault on academic freedom.
A Nation Divided (Lynn Pasquerella, Liberal Education/AAC&U, Fall 2024): Why American higher education must reaffirm its democratic purposes.
Future Imperfect
Naval Academy Faculty Told to Avoid ‘Divisive Concepts’ Like ‘Systemic Racism’ (Ellie Wolfe, Baltimore Banner, February 14, 2025): In an email by Provost Samara Firebaugh faculty were instructed to search course materials for words like “diversity,” “minority,” “belonging,” “bias,” “representation,” and “oppression.” “Do not use materials that can be interpreted to assign blame to generalized groups for enduring social conditions, particularly discrimination or inequality,” Firebaugh said in the email message. “Do not employ readings or other materials that promote the concepts of ‘gender ideology,’ ‘divisive concepts,’ ‘race or sex stereotyping,’ and ‘race or sex scapegoating,’ including critical race theory, intersectionality, privilege, patriarchy or other such theories.”
‘We’re Like Sitting Ducks’: The Right’s ‘War on Woke’ Has a Well-Tested Playbook to Take Down Academics (Alice Speri, Guardian, February 14, 2025): The campaign against Claudine Gay, Harvard’s first Black president, has become a blueprint increasingly wielded against women and scholars of color.
Conferences and Webinars
What Works in 2025? Building for the Future of Higher Education. The Center for Innovative Pedagogy at Kenyon College invites presentations on teaching and learning for a hybrid conference May 28-29, 2025. This conference is an opportunity for faculty and academic support professionals to share their experiences innovating for the classroom. Proposals should include an explanation of how sessions would apply to the teaching of undergraduates in small colleges and universities. Organizers will consider all proposals that would apply to undergraduate education at a small college or university, but encourage proposals in these areas:
- approaches that build community and belonging in the classroom
- creative connections between different disciplines across the curriculum
- experiential opportunities and real world applications for the liberal arts
Propose a presentation at https://forms.gle/aU8u6A1G4s1kbdxu6. Deadline to submit is Friday, March 15. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance status by March 29.
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)