Teaching and Learning
It’s Not Them: It’s You (Erin Morris Miller, Inside Higher Ed, May 21, 2025): Rather than fixating on students’ supposed deficiencies, professors should recommit to core principles for learning.
Conversations and Coursework: Strategies to Engage Undergraduate Students with Course Content (Melissa Parks, Faculty Focus, May 21, 2025): While engagement can be observed in many forms, this piece focuses on transactional engagement in which students interact with each other and with the instructor.
Why Theater Belongs at the Heart of Campus Life (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, May 20, 2025): Making theater a core academic experience.
AI and Threats to Academic Integrity: What to Do (Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, May 20, 2025): Three in four chief technology officers say that artificial intelligence has proven to be a moderate or significant risk to academic integrity at their institution. Experts have ideas as to what can help.
Steps Toward Creating a More Accessible and Inclusive College Classroom (Laura N. Sarchet, et al, Faculty Focus, May 19, 2025): A faculty vision of inclusive pedagogy informed by equity and social justice transcends bias and makes diversity functional and beneficial to all students.
Teaching Students to Identify and Attack Misinformation (Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed, May 16, 2025): An interdisciplinary course at the University of Southern California teaches engineering students research skills and information literacy.
How to Get Started with Interactive Storytelling in Any Discipline (Bonni Stachowiak, Teaching in Higher Ed, May 15, 2025): A 45-minute podcast with Laura Gibbs on the importance of storytelling and making meaning personal for students.
The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It (Kashmir Hill, New York Times, May 14, 2025): Students call it hypocritical. A senior at Northeastern University demanded her tuition back. But instructors say generative A.I. tools make them better at their jobs.
Higher Education and the Trump Administration:
Academic Freedom, DEI, Admissions, and Speech
We Don’t Need More Administrators Inspecting Our Ideas (Nicolas Langlitz, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2025): Viewpoint diversity is important, but it can’t be mandated.
Catholic College Presidents Decry Trump Administration’s Interference with Higher Ed (Katie Collins Scott, National Catholic Reporter, May 14, 2025): The heads of Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College and Fordham, among others, are speaking out against the Trump administration for endangering higher education.
Stop Using Antisemitism as a Weapon Against Higher Education (Elaine Maimon, Philadelphia Citizen, May 13, 2025): A longtime university president tells Congress to cease and desist from persecuting colleges under the guise of fighting antisemitism.
Universities in the Crosshairs
Colleges Could Be Targeted Anew Under Fraud Law, DOJ Says (Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive, May 20, 2025): The agency created a civil rights initiative to seek out violations of the False Claims Act, which could include diversity initiatives.
NSF Cuts Off Colleges That Push ‘Illegal DEI,’ Boycott Israel (Ryan Quinn, Inside Higher Ed, May 21, 2025): The NSF implemented these restrictions for any new grants or any funding amendments to current grants.
How Trump Defeated Columbia (Nick Summers, New York Magazine, May 19, 2025): The inside story of an unconditional surrender.
Harvard’s Battle with Trump Escalates as Research Money Is Suddenly Canceled (Maddie Khaw, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2025): The university filed an amended complaint against the administration in response to the loss of the grants, which had previously been frozen.
The Trump Administration Widens Its Scrutiny of Colleges, With Help from the Internet (Francie Diep, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 15, 2025): After months of headlines about elite colleges, the Trump administration is announcing investigations of less-prominent ones, sometimes seemingly in reaction to viral news.
International Students and Scholars
International Students Are Again Threatened with Deportation (Karin Fischer, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 21, 2025): The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is threatening a fresh round of deportations of international students, this time aimed at visa holders who are late in reporting their employment on optional practical training, the postgraduate work program.
International College Students Bring Billions to the US. Here’s Why That May Change (Zachary Schermele, USA Today, May 15, 2025): Colleges and universities rely heavily on international students for research and tuition. Without them, officials say, many schools would be incapacitated.
Extra Credit Reading
Timeless Texts, Lifelong Lessons (Steven Mintz, Inside Higher Ed, May 22, 2025): Strategies for designing core texts courses for today’s students.
25 Stats for 2025 Graduates (Ashley Mowreader, Inside Higher Ed, May 22, 2025): A compilation of recent surveys of college students and hiring managers provides a glimpse into the future of this year’s college graduates.
Our Debate Over Higher Ed Has Lost the Plot (Lynn Pasquerella, Inside Higher Ed, May 20, 2025): We need to reorient the national conversation.
Why the College Premium Is Shrinking for Low-Income Students (Eric Hoover, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 19, 2025): Since the 1960s, researchers found, college-going has become steadily “less valuable,” in terms of wage and employment benefits, for lower-income students, but increasingly valuable for wealthier ones.
How to ‘Write Like You Teach’ (James M. Lang, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2025): Advice on using what you know about teaching to improve your public writing.
Future Imperfect
Oklahoma High Schools to Teach 2020 Election Conspiracy Theories as Fact (Maya Yang, Guardian, May 17, 2025): Oklahoma’s new social studies curriculum will ask high school students to identify “discrepancies” in the 2020 election results.
As Deportation Target Widens, College-Educated Undocumented Grow More Fearful (Jo Napolitano, The 74, May 13, 2025): While Trump’s focus has fallen on immigrant laborers, there are 1.7M undocumented with a bachelor’s degree or higher and 408K enrolled in college.
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)