Lara Pfadt: Decarbonizing New England campuses

Wellesley College’s Pomeroy Hall living room showing upgrades, including new lighting and sensitive paint colors.

—Photo courtesy of Raj Das Photography

From The England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org).

Over the past decades, universities have been at the forefront of establishing ambitious goals for decarbonizing campuses. While there are many variables in how to advance energy efficiency in the campus-built environment, some universities have taken the strategic approach of combining energy efforts with the heavy maintenance and upkeep needs of the buildings.

Universities must identify and solve challenges associated with buildings of different eras, programmatic uses, MEP (mechanical, electrical and plumbing) systems, and energy generation. This can be daunting, but necessary for a carbon-neutral future, and collaboration with university stakeholders, contractors, and engineers can be the key to success.

Our Boston-based architectural firm Finegold Alexander has had the opportunity to work with several campuses, including Amherst College, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Wellesley College, in the town of the same name,. and Brandeis University, in Waltham, on energy master plans and targeted renovations to achieve decarbonization goals. This work includes collaborating with an interdisciplinary team to identify targeted, cost-effective actions at individual buildings that meet institutional priorities of energy reduction, deferred maintenance, and accessibility.

A case study at Wellesley

In 2019, Finegold Alexander was engaged by Wellesley College to study early 20th Century residence halls to realize significant deferred maintenance, infrastructure, and accessibility upgrades across campus. Simultaneously, Wellesley was in the midst of an energy master plan to determine how to meet its “E2040” goals of reducing its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 90 percent below 2010 levels.

The energy master plan looked at ways to reduce GHG emissions from space heating and cooling across the entire portfolio of buildings. The historic residence halls connect to the campus steam loop and are heated with steam or hot-water radiators. Salas O’Brien (formerly named MEP Associates) led the master plan, which involves the conversion of the campus from a steam distribution loop to low-temperature hot water. This changeover to low-temperature water supports potential geothermal installations, gradually reducing energy input and, therefore, carbon emissions.

Tower Court at Wellesley College.

The built environment, and energy used to power it, is a major contributor to GHG emissions on campuses. Wellesley College is no different. Many of its buildings date from the early 20th century and produce higher energy usage due to mass masonry wall construction, original steel windows, slate roofs, and complex gothic detailing. Working alongside Salas O’Brien, Finegold Alexander asked questions about the implications of this work for the architecture of the campus’s historic and existing buildings. Were the colleges considering envelope upgrades? What about potential code triggers when infrastructure work exceeds certain dollar values? Were there synergies to be found by addressing deferred maintenance at the same time as energy infrastructure? How can embodied carbon be measured simultaneously with operational carbon in these plans?

One targeted renovation includes Severance Hall, built in 1926 and part of the college’s iconic Tower Court complex. Finegold Alexander started at the building envelope exploring upgrade options and energy conservation measures, testing each through energy modeling and providing lifecycle costing for each. Energy conservation measures were also reviewed to curb deferred maintenance issues, such as water intrusion and occupant comfort issues. Through this comparison, the design team and college settled on a path combining new insulated walls at the exterior with interior storm windows. This plan allowed for a decrease in the radiator size of the new low-temperature system while providing greater comfort for occupants.

In addition to the envelope efforts, conversations with residential life stakeholders set program and energy goals, allowing the project to incorporate outward-facing improvements and stay within budget. These items include updates to the historic living room and other gathering spaces—focusing on an infusion of new A/V, functional and decorative lighting, and technology to showcase historic features. Renovations, including kitchenettes, bathrooms and common spaces, provide fully accessible and more functional spaces, carving out small gathering areas off the long corridors of this Victorian-era residence hall.

What’s next?

Universities and colleges continue to pave the way in terms of sustainability goals, but in recent years, such goals can be found across other sectors, such as towns and cities developing sustainability master plans and adopting net zero goals. The increased federal and state support, largely stemming from the U.S. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, in the form of grants and building code modifications, supports the energy efficiency efforts in our communities and institutions.

Lara Pfadt is a senior associate architect and sustainability strategist at Finegold Alexander Architects.

Karen Gross: Good things have happened in higher education during the pandemic

From Wikipedia

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

It would not be the least bit unusual to feel pessimistic about education in general and higher education in particular. Enrollments have been declining at many institutions across the education landscape. Budgets are tight at many. Shootings on campuses or unexpected deaths of students are far too frequent. So too are hazing and harassment. Discrimination is on the rise. The equity gap is widening. Faculty and staff are disenchanted and stressed; so are students. Mental wellness is a challenge for many. In short, the future doesn’t look bright. And the media are having a heyday sharing all the negative news.

Yet, I still have hope.

What alternative is there? If we don’t have hope, we stagnate and fail to make forward progress. Add to this that, philosophically speaking, hope is an attitude we hold that enables us to navigate difficult times with a forward-focused approach and a belief in the possibility of a better future.

Pandemic positives

There is a third reason that I see hope in education. It has to do with what we experienced and how we responded to the pandemic. It may seem counterintuitive to many, but we need to shift the lens through which we view the pandemic’s impact on education.

Most people have been focused on the pandemic’s negatives and how we eradicate or lessen all that has happened to students. There is an embedded assumption that we need to move “back to normal” to restore what the pandemic stole.

But this assumes that education was, pre-pandemic, in good shape, which is far from the truth. Even pre-pandemic, there were deficits in education that led to student failures in college and lack of access to quality postsecondary education for far too many low-income students. Pedagogy was suboptimal in many classrooms; lecturing was too common.

Demographics also impacted educational enrollment in a period before the pandemic started. And though there were approaches being researched and tried before the pandemic to improve higher education, many of these ideas were not implemented widely or fully. For example, social and emotional learning was gaining traction as were community schools and trauma-sensitive schools. Studies showing the value of enhancing the student-teacher relationship as it improves learning and self-control were available and used by some academic institutions.

But we have ignored the positives that occurred within the education landscape, As part of a book we are co-authoring, Harvard Medical School assistant professor of psychology Edward K. S. Wang and I have gathered a wide range of positives that actually occurred during the pandemic in terms of learning and psychosocial development. Yes, there were positives although they have often not been named or recognized. And these positives have not been replicated or scaled.

Here are just a few examples of these positives. With educators working online, they were able to see students engaging with their families and that often disclosed dysfunction that, but for online learning, would not have been observed. So, in a real way, educators had an opportunity to understand more fully who their students were/are. Consider too the fact that some students who did not engage in classroom discussion when learning was in-person, were able to participate more fully and more easily online; for these students, it is likely that the absence of teasing or peer pressure were eased online. With both in-person masked and socially distant learning and in the online environment, educators exercised increased strategies to engage and connect with students as well as connecting them to each other; the absence of the “normal” engagement approaches allowed for new avenues for connection. This prompted more project-based learning, pod learning and interactive activities, all educational positives.

What if we try to identify as many of these positives as possible and reflect on how did they come about? Then we can look at how to replicate and scale these positives for the betterment of higher education moving forward.

Begin with how the positives came to pass. Think about this phrase and its applicability: Necessity is the mother of invention. We know that in times of crisis, we develop strategies to cope and deal with what is before us. We may not know why what we develop during a crisis works, but there is no question but that crises create opportunities to change the status quo. Crises force us to act quickly too, because change is afoot and will not await the traditional timetables for change.

And, that happened in education at all levels. Educators figured out–not systemically to be sure–how to teach online (some for the first time). These educators wrestled with new ways to present materials. These educators struggled to engage students who were not all in the same room–engage them with the material, engage them with one another and engage them with the educator.

Take this example. Some college students were signing into classes, but were not engaging with learning. Their names, not faces, appeared. They muted themselves. In reality, some professors did not even know if the students were “there” in terms of paying attention. Some professors realized that “teaching as usual” was not an option. There needed to be different incentives, different approaches, different forms of engagement.

While new to online platforms and learning with their colleagues, professors tried new pedagogies. Some professors tried using polling to measure learning and class engagement. Some tried using breakout rooms, allowing students to process information and solve problems. Some turned to videos within the online environment and then encouraged discussion. Some used the chat room and other writing tools, recognizing that different students had different learning styles in the online world (something that was true pre-pandemic). Some had efforts to get students to “tune” in by having true/false questions, the answers to which involved showing or not showing faces on screen. Some professors came online early and left late to enable students to ask questions. Some professors used email and online platforms to message students between classes and make connections. Some had virtual office hours. Some had phone calls with students. The ways professors made online learning work, when they were previously unaccustomed to this learning modality, was remarkable.

These are all approaches which, absent the sudden crisis and need to move online or into hybrid mode, would not have happened. Yes, online learning did exist pre-pandemic, but it was not deployed in many traditional academic environments. And, in the process of changing how they taught their students, professors experienced changes too in how they viewed their roles and responsibilities as educators. In a sense, the shared Pandemic experience allowed students and educators to engage more fully and with greater understanding of each other.

Reflect on these examples.

Some students expressed frustration with their learning through online behavior like noticeably demonstrating disinterest; they multitasked or used their cell phones or were eating and drinking, suggesting the need for a professor to engage with them offline. And, seeing this behavior encouraged some professors to pause, take note and reach out, likely because they themselves were struggling to remain engaged.

Some students were unable to connect to the materials or the class and farmed off the work to outsiders. Recognizing this risk made professors create assignments that were unique and unavailable to purchase; they also designed engagement and its impact on class grading to operate differently so that students were unable disregard in-class participation.

Some students were dysregulated or disassociated, whether online or in-person; this means they were unable to concentrate and learn as a consequence of their traumatic pandemic (or other) experience. Some of these students were angry over the change in their educational experience and wanted no part of the new offerings. Some simply checked out even though they were present. Some acted out by stomping around, throwing paper, banging on their phone, being loud and argumentative and this could be witnessed online or in person. Professors and staff had to intervene and engage differently with these students, including through interventions with staff with experience in mental wellness.

The pandemic also brought policy flexibility with experimental efforts, pilot initiatives and changes in grading and discipline. Addressing NEBHE’s fall 2022 board meeting, Inside Higher Ed’s Doug Lederman noted that after trillions of dollars in federal aid helped higher education make faster adaptations during the pandemic, now, sadly, institutions and educators are returning to the old ways. In some ways, we can see parallels to the speed with which Covid vaccines were created; federal funding, collaboration and need were compelling forces.

Here’s the point: Educators teaching during the pandemic made changes to what they did and how they did it–even if they would not have made changes but for the Pandemic’s intervention. What they did not realize or understand is that the changes they made should not be limited to the Pandemic world. They employed approaches that are valuable still: engagement; connection and communication. And these changed learning strategies are trauma-responsive, even though they likely were not used with trauma amelioration at the forefront of professors’ minds. Indeed, the trauma literature abounds with references to the need for trusted individuals, ongoing connection and increased communication.

One strategy was to visualize this change in the midst of a crisis is to reflect on the following illustration. Pre-pandemic, things were like the lower left corner of this painting, largely ordered although certainly not homogeneous. During the pandemic, things changed, and the usual rules and formats and engagement changed and we became disordered in a sense. The order pre-pandemic was disrupted. We needed professors to change; we needed students to change; we needed institutions to change. And the changes were made as we went. We built the education plane as it was flying.

What does this all mean?

We need to identify the positives that occurred in education during the pandemic. Then we need to find ways to share these positives so they can be replicated and scaled. And we need to develop stickiness— how to make change last and endure so that we can see long-term improvement. Now, stickiness is tricky; how we can make social change is a topic worthy of future discussion.

As I reflect on the positive changes engendered by the pandemic, I am struck by the statement that accompanies an ancient Japanese form of pottery repair named Kintsugi. The broken shards are pieced together with gold and then it is said, “More Beautiful for Being Broken.”

In a very real way, inspired by Kintsugi, we need to make peace with the pieces the pandemic left behind and gather the positive shards and allow them to be part of education moving forward. This following illustration that I created is an effort to speak to the beauty that can be found if we piece together what is broken. And, by analogy, so it is with education.

With the Kintsugi philosophy in mind, here is what I see. I see that positive change happened in higher education during the pandemic, and for complex reasons, we have largely ignored it. Instead, we are enamored with the negatives the pandemic produced, which are plentiful to be sure.

We would be wise to look at the positives, some of which were detailed above, that occurred–within and outside individual classrooms and within the higher education community. And we can then name what happened during the pandemic us to move forward. If we do this, we can use what we did to better education for our students today and tomorrow.

A crisis created opportunity for change. Let’s not let that opportunity go to waste to play off a hackneyed phrase. That, at the end of the day, is my hope. And it is not chimerical hope. It is hope grounded in this reality: if we are willing to work to acknowledge and then use the positive change we created, we can improve higher education.

Karen Gross is a former president of Southern Vermont College and a senior policy adviser to the U.S. Department of Education. She specializes in student success and trauma across the educational landscape and teaches at the Rutgers University School of Social Work. Her most recent book, Trauma Doesn’t Stop at the School Door: Solutions and Strategies for Educators, PreK-College, was released in June 2020 by Columbia Teachers College Press and was the winner of the Delta Kappa Gamma Educator’s Book of the Year award.

John Harney: Many thanks, New England

John O. Harney

From, The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

In October, I wrote to NEBHE colleagues to let them know I would be retiring from the organization and the editorship of its New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE) in early January 2023.

While NEBHE has been my job, NEJHE has been my passion. I joined NEBHE in 1988 and, in 1990, became editor of NEJHE (then called Connection: New England’s Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development).

Thirty-four years for one outlet. Sometimes I forget I’m even that old.

I looked at the journal editions, printed on paper until 2010, as pieces of art (albeit imperfect ones) as much as a news service. The best issues I thought were like our own “Sgt. Pepper’’ album. Today, reminds me a bit of Bob Dylan’s “Maggie’s Farm.’’

I’ll miss working with our distinguished authors, sometimes goading them into writing their bylined commentaries—usually for no fee. Those writers also happened to be our readers … a community of policymakers, practitioners and regionalists we described variously as “opinion leaders” in the old days, “thought leaders” more recently. All bound together by an interest in higher education and New England (which I recall was a tough audience to quantify for analytically retentive advertisers).

I’ll also miss the editorial “departments” we developed, such as Data Connection, a sort of spinoff of the Harper’s Magazine Index, but with a New England and higher education flavor. Reflective of a certain “NEJHE Beat,” these items—like a lot of NEJHE content—track along a unique constellation of issues anchored in higher education but also moored to social justice, economic and workforce development, regional cooperation, quality of life, academic research, workplaces and other topics that, together, say New Englandness.

In our print days, I was especially invested in my Editor’s Memo columns that opened every edition from 1990 to 2010.

A few of these Editor’s Memos noted the transition from Connection to NEJHE, an illness that forced me to take leave in 2007 and the journal’s shift from print to all-Web in 2010.

Many pieces looked at the future of New England. One touched on our mock Race for Governor of the State of New England. That exercise helped midwife New England Online, an attempt by NEBHE and partners to take advantage of then-new networking technologies to provide something of a clearinghouse of all things New England—a bit unfocused perhaps, but poignant in a region where, the “winner” of that fantastic New England governor’s race, then state Rep. Arnie Arnesen of New Hampshire, quipped that the capital of New England should not be, say, Boston or Hartford, but instead something along the lines of “www.ne.gov.” (See our house ad.)

The House that Jack Built focused on the first NEBHE president I worked with, Jack Hoy, who passed away in 2013. Jack was a mentor who pioneered understanding of the profound nexus between higher education and economic development that is now taken for granted and that served as the basis for the journal’s name, Connection.

Among other of these commentaries and columns, several focused on the magical relationship between higher-education institutions and their host communities. Even in the emerging age of a placeless university, there is no diminishing the correlation between campuses and good restaurants, bookstores, theaters and other amenities, driven by faculty, students and otherwise smart locals.

In this vein, I was personally sustained for more than three decades by NEBHE’s home in Boston. Despite its difficult racial past (which NEBHE and NEJHE have attempted to address), the Hub, and next-door Cambridge, comprise Exhibit A in such college-influenced communities. Indeed, our street in Downtown Crossing has offered a lesson in the region’s changing economy, being transformed from a strip of small nonprofits that wanted to be close to Beacon Hill, to dollar stores, to, most recently, chic restaurants and bars. The foot traffic, meanwhile, has become much more collegiate as Emerson College and Suffolk University have expanded downtown.

I noted in my letter to colleagues that I strongly believe that the regional journal is a key strength of NEBHE that should continue to be appreciated and bolstered.

For years, we characterized Connection and NEJHE as America’s only regional journal on higher education and its impact on the economy and quality of life. In addition, the topics we’ve covered are just too important to cast our gaze elsewhere. New England’s challenging demography—where some states now see more deaths than births—means there are fewer of us to nourish a workforce and exercise clout in Congress. This all makes our historic strength in attracting foreign students and immigrants to build our communities and industries all the more important. Growing chasms in income and wealth between chief executives and employees, meanwhile, agitate antidemocratic and racist forces. While too many critics diss snowflakes, dangerous trauma grows among students and staff. And a pandemic (that is not over) exposed our fault lines, but also showed the promise of joining together behind scientific breakthroughs … and behind one another.

NEBHE President Michael Thomas and I agreed that the weeks leading up to my retirement will provide opportunities to celebrate the journal’s four decades of contributions to the region—as well as to think about its future and the ways NEBHE can best inform and engage stakeholders going forward.

But these are tough times for independent-minded journalism—especially in the quasi-free press world of association journalism, where the goal is to be objective, but for a cause (and ours is generally a good one). NEBHE has launched a job search for a director of communications and marketing. To be sure, my functions at NEBHE also included PR and media relations and style maven (editorial style that is), and those too are key tasks that NEBHE must continue to fulfill. (Full disclosure, I always urged NEJHE authors to make their pieces “issue-oriented” and “avoid marketing.” The goal for the journal was to be thoughtful and candid.)

Just keep it real.

Here’s to the future of NEBHE and NEJHE.

John O. Harney is the executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Editor’s note: New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is a former member of the Advisory Board of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Stephen J. Nelson: Painful lessons in college leadership: Dartmouth College and the University of Florida

Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, soon to be president of the University of Florida, speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference, a right-wing Republican event.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

In April 1981, David McLaughlin was named the 14th president of Dartmouth College. Though separated by four decades, there are striking similarities between Dartmouth’s appointment of McLaughlin and the University of Florida’s selection last week of its next president, Ben Sasse. If the past is prologue, Sasse and Florida are in for a rough ride.

McLaughlin was an alumnus of Dartmouth, both as an undergraduate and subsequently with an MBA from the Tuck School. While not from the Senatorial arena of Sasse, McLaughlin was a highly political animal. Dartmouth’s choice of him as president came at a moment for the college when disaffected conservative alumni were outraged about racial diversity and the opening of their male bastion to women. McLaughlin’s conservative politics and his purported fiscal belt-tightening reputation and presumed budgetary savvy as a corporate CEO at Champion Paper and Toro Corporation were thought by supporters to be great assets.

The conservative student newspaper, the Dartmouth Review, was about a year old. Conservative alumni, led by monied outside supporters, were opening their wallets and clamoring for more of the contentious voice of the Review. McLaughlin was expected to appease those forces. He promised reinstating ROTC, which had sat dormant for over a decade dating to when the faculty, in the heat of the Vietnam War, cut Dartmouth’s academic ties to the program. Conservative alumni and students cheered his arrival. McLaughlin was to be the fixer for conservative complaints about a new progressive Dartmouth—minorities, women and other changes—that they could not stand.

Sasse carries into his presidential tenure similar conservative baggage. His supporters have grand hopes that he will use the cudgels for which he is famous in the world of politics—decrying gay marriage, advocating overthrow of the Affordable Care Act, and being against abortion—to instill his social brand and edge into the culture of the university. He claims that will not be the case. But given his undeniable high-profile public positions on gay and lesbian issues and rights, abortion, healthcare, affirmative action and the MAGA agenda, the idea that Sasse will change his stripes and that his conservative political bent will now somehow disappear strains credulity and credibility.

As part of his welcome to the campus, the University of Florida faculty have already voted no confidence in the board’s selection process, a tantamount rejection of how and why Sasse was appointed in the first place. Again, if the Dartmouth experience with McLaughlin is any gauge, this vote is only the first salvo in what will be a continuing debate about Sasse as a university president.

From the outset of McLaughlin’s appointment, the Dartmouth faculty, like their Florida counterparts, voiced immense skepticism about the board’s process that resulted in his selection. In the introductory open public faculty meeting that April 1981—I was in the room, then a student affairs administrator—McLaughlin was greeted by pointed criticism from Dartmouth professors. They questioned his capacity to lead in a college and academic culture that was the antithesis of his exclusive corporate sector autocratic and top-down experience. Several faculty members railed to his face about his glaring lack of academic credentials—an MBA, but no Ph.D.—about having no experience teaching and leading a college, bringing only business experience that would never translate to being Dartmouth’s voice in the presidential pulpit.

There was no vote of no confidence in the trustees at the time of their decision. That came four years later dressed in the garb of the unprecedented impaneling of a committee to review McLaughlin’s performance as president. But the Dartmouth faculty restiveness and fear was unmistakable. Their misgivings and judgment that day were born out in a tumultuous, contentious and divisive presidential tenure marked by aggressive, vindicative grudge-based senior administrative turnover, duplicitous leadership, e.g., saying one thing to one group or individual and then the direct opposite to someone else, and a divide-and-conquer style that pitted campus constituencies against each.

For many observers, the Sasse and McLaughlin appointments are sadly only grasped as institutional overreach designed to satisfy certain constituents, rather than aspiring to the greater good of the entire university. McLaughlin lacked fundamental leadership abilities in a president of a college or university. As Sasse assumes the presidency of the University of Florida, there are eerie parallels to Dartmouth’s experience more than 40 years ago. This reality dictates that the Florida faculty must be robust in their scrutiny of how Sasse carries himself, the decisions and actions he takes and his leadership of their university community and its culture. Based on the experience of McLaughlin at Dartmouth, that means the Florida faculty must be vigilantly tuned in to what goes on in the who’s and why’s of senior leadership turnover and new appointments and to kneejerk tendencies to favor conservative causes and to support conservative over liberal professors, student groups and leaders. They must also be attentive to any fiscal and fundraising sleight-of-hand and abuse of the books to make the president look successful.

What is always essential in the leadership of America’s colleges and universities is the naming of presidents who possess critical capacities and commitments: moral grounding, the broad center of understanding and the intellectual gravitas essential in the quest to engage academic communities in the forthright pursuit of intellectual inquiry, freedom of ideas and discourse, and the common good.

Worthy and great college presidents are not accidents or the result of luck. Ill-fitted, ill-suited presidents can do great damage. Early glimmers of what is in the offing reveal what the path might be. Sasse, his faculty and all the constituencies of the University of Florida are on a precipice.

They should look at what happened at Dartmouth in the 1980s, when pressures for conservative, return to a bygone era leadership overwhelmed common sense calling for an academically, intellectually and balanced credible presidential appointment, one truly fit for the complexities and diverse voices in a university community. At Dartmouth, McLaughlin’s selection sorely damaged the esprit de corps of administrative staff, eroded \ the stature and public image of the college and caused a corrosive cynicism in the campus community about its culture. The realities of such presidencies should make all wary indeed.

Stephen J. Nelson is professor of educational leadership at Bridgewater State University and Senior Scholar with the Leadership Alliance at Brown University. He is the author of the recently released book, John G. Kemeny and Dartmouth College: The Man, the Times, and the College Presidency. His forthcoming book, Searching the Soul of the College and University in America: Religious and Democratic Covenants and Controversies, will be released in 2023. Nelson served on the student-affairs staff at Dartmouth College from 1978 to 1987.

Felice Duffy: Forward or backward with new Title IX regs?

— Photo by Sichow

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

NEW HAVEN, Conn.

On the 50th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX, the U.S. Department of Education released proposed new regulations for Title IX policies. For the most part, these new regulations reverse regulatory changes made during the Trump administration.

The Biden administration insists the new regs will “restore crucial protections” that had been “weakened.” Commenters have their own opinion on the efficacy of the proposed regulations, with over 235,000 formal comments filed during the 60-day comment period.

So, do the proposed regulations represent a step forward or backward?

Overview of changes

The deceptively simple words in Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 have been augmented by numerous regulations and judicial interpretations over the decades. While the aim is to protect students from sex-based discrimination, many worry that the regulatory efforts to right or prevent wrongs go too far and infringe on the due process rights of those accused of Title IX violations.

During the Trump administration, the Office for Civil Rights spent nearly 18 months reviewing less than 125,000 public comments before issuing new final regulations that resulted in significant changes. With almost 90% more comments to review this time around, it will be interesting to see how long it takes the department to issue final rules about key issues they are considering, such as:

• How colleges are required to investigate reports of sexual assault.

• Whether colleges are required to hold live hearings before issuing decisions.

• Protections for LGBTQIA+ students.

• The definition of sexual harassment.

While some commenters object that the proposed rule changes go too far in one direction, others insist they do not go far enough.

Live hearings and cross-examination

One of the most significant controversies regarding the proposed regulations centers on the types of proceedings colleges must hold to hear Title IX complaints. The new regulations allow schools to hold separate private meetings with complainants and respondents instead of live hearings with the opportunity for cross-examinations. Supporters of the change assert that the disciplinary hearings required under current rules are too much like adversarial courtroom proceedings. Many say that allowing colleges to establish less formal, non-confrontational processes will save money and encourage victims to proceed without fear of repercussions.

However, other commenters expressed concerns that eliminating live hearings and allowing colleges to use the same body to investigate and judge the validity of complaints violates the due process rights of students accused of violations.

Burden of proof in sex discrimination and misconduct

Controversy continues about how much a complainant must prove to win a case alleging that they have been subjected to sexual discrimination, harassment or assault. The proposed rules would generally establish a “preponderance of evidence” standard in most but not all cases, so a student need only to prove that it was “more likely than not” that the discrimination occurred. The current rules provide a choice between the preponderance of evidence and clear and convincing evidence standards.

Critics of the change say the clear and convincing standard is necessary to protect the respondent’s rights, and they point out that it is still less than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal cases.  

Gender identity and sexual orientation

The proposed regulations expand the anti-discrimination protections of Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation when it comes to college programs or activities, except athletics. The department has delayed ruling on the highly controversial issues related to participation in sports programs.

Even without addressing athletics, the expansion of protections generated numerous forceful comments. Those in favor assert that the new rules will improve the safety and wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ students and resolve equality issues that are currently being addressed on a costly case-by-case basis in the courts. Opponents of the expansion allege that by requiring schools to allow participation in programs based on gender identity, the new regulations actually violate the Title IX mission of providing equal access to education benefits on the basis of sex. They also argue that the proposed changes exceed the department’s statutory authority and would chill free speech rights on campus. For example, the definition of sexual harassment will be expanded such that students could be investigated for not using certain pronouns or using incorrect pronouns that do not correctly reflect the gender with which a person identifies.

Are we moving forward or backward?

While the new regulations are not yet final, the final regs are expected to track closely with the proposed version. Whether you are a complainant or a respondent regarding any number of explicit proposed provisions in the regulations, each side would argue the provision is either moving toward a brighter future or repressive past—any provision that makes it more difficult to file a complaint (such as requiring a formal complaint under the current regs) makes it harder for complainants (repressive past) and easier for respondents (brighter future); and keeping the standard at the preponderance of evidence versus raising it to clear and convincing, is easier for complainants (repressive past) and more difficult for respondents (brighter future).

The one certainty is that when schools implement the new regulations, those who are unhappy with the results will turn to the courts for clarification and possible nullification. It will be interesting to see how the courts respond.

Felice Duffy is a Title IX lawyer with Duffy Law, based in New Haven, Conn., and a former federal prosecutor.

John O. Harney: Some intriguing N.H. and other indices

“The View from Andrew’s Room Collage Series #8″, by Timothy Harney, a professor at the Monserrat College of Art, Beverly, Mass.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON
Percentage of U.S. counties where more people died than were born in 2021: 73%  University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data

Number of additional births that would have occurred in the past 14 years had pre-Great Recession fertility rates continued: 8,600,000 University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy analysis of National Center for Health Statistics data

Percentage of Americans who told the Annenberg Science Knowledge survey in July 2022 that they have returned to their “normal, pre-COVID-19 life”: 41% Annenberg Public Policy Center

Percentage who said that in January 2022: 16% Annenberg Public Policy Center

Percentage of teenagers who reported that their post-high school graduation plans changed between the March 2020 start of the COVID-19 pandemic and March 2022: 36% EdChoice\

Change during that period in percentage of teenagers who said they planned to enroll in a four-year college: -14% EdChoice

Ranks of “Self Discovery,” “Finances” and “Mental Health” among reasons for change in plans: 1st, 2nd, 3rd EdChoice

Percentage of college students who say they will pay their education expenses completely on their own: 67% Cengage

Percentage who say they have $250 or less left after paying for education costs each month: 46% Cengage

Ranks of “lower tuition,” “more affordable options for course materials” and “lowering on-campus costs, such as housing and meal plan costs” among actions students say their colleges could take to lower education costs: 1st, 2nd, 3rd Cengage

Percentage of Americans who graded their local public schools with an A or a B in 2019: 60% Education Next

Percentage who gave those grades in 2022 after two years of COVID-related disruption: 52% Education Next

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are women: 5% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Black: 4% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Asian: 2% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Percentage of aircraft pilots and flight engineers who are Hispanic: 6% U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Approximate percentage increase in sworn personnel in New Hampshire State Police, from 2001 to 2020: 30% Concord Monitor

Percentage of New Hampshire State Police personnel who are white: 95% Concord Monitor reporting of N.H. Department of Safety data

Percentage of New Hampshire State Police personnel who are men: 91% Concord Monitor reporting of N.H. Department of Safety data

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Seeking ‘a more cultural experience’ than in New England

The Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, in Boston, is listed as one of New England’s few Minority-Serving Institutions.

Another is Holyoke (Mass.) Community College, whose main campus is at the edge of the municipal watershed for the Holyoke Water Works.

— Photo by Holyoke Community College

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

Though home to  more than 250 colleges and universities, New England boasts only nine so-called Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs)—institutions focused specifically on providing an abundance of resources to equip  minority students with the tools they need to be successful in furthering their education.

MSIs are colleges or universities that enroll a high percentage of minority and historically underrepresented students. In New England in particular, most of these nine MSIs serve students who are predominantly Asian American, Native American, Pacific Islander, or Hispanic. It is important to recognize and highlight these MSIs for their efforts to create an environment that is illustrious in curricula and celebrates the unique cultures of their students, while also understanding that there is more work to be done to serve more students of color in the New England region. Achieving this awareness is a crucial step toward creating equity and inclusion in New England higher education institutions.

NEBHE Policy & Research Intern Damaria Joyner’s journey in the Massachusetts school system influenced her decision to leave the region and attend an a historically Black college and university (HBCU), Delaware State University. “It was not until senior year of high school when I experienced having my first Black teacher,” writes Joyner. “From this moment, I realized that there was a lack of representation for teachers of color in my region. I was determined to further my education at an institution where representation of educators mattered and was prevalent. I also chose to attend an institution that would be culturally relevant to myself as a student. It was important to be surrounded and supported by professors who had my best interest academically and personally as a young Black woman.”

Joyner’s  process of choosing a college had little to do with the academic rigor of the institution, she notes in her recent personal narrative for NEBHE. “Rather, I sought a more cultural experience where I could learn and converse in an environment that supported me as a student, but also as a student of color. I wrote this personal narrative so that it might resonate with other students of color in New England who have had a similar experience to mine, as well as bring awareness to the greater audience of the importance of the culture of an institution as well as the academic fortitude.”

“From representation within the faculty and staff to the resources offered that go beyond academics to ensure minority students thrive, it is vital that students of color and traditionally underrepresented students in New England and everywhere can feel supported so that they can thrive,” concludes Joyner.

She tells readers she was drawn out of New England for college, and suggests reading her narrative to understand what might have caused her to stay.

LiAnna Davis: How New England students are improving Wikipedia

Dante holding a copy of the Divine Comedy, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Domenico di Michelino's 1465 fresco. Wellesley (Mass.) College students have been editing the Wikipedia articles on the masterpiece to highlight the women Dante referenced.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org), based in Boston.

You probably use Wikipedia regularly, maybe even every day. It’s where the world goes to learn more about almost anything, do a quick fact-check or get lost in an endless stream of link clicking. But have you ever stopped to think about the people behind the information you’re reading on Wikipedia? Or how their perspectives may inform what’s covered—and what’s not?

All content to Wikipedia is added and edited in a crowdsourced model, wherein nearly anyone can click the “edit” button and change content on Wikipedia. An active community of dedicated volunteers adds content and monitors the edits made by others, following a complex series of policies and guidelines that have been developed in the 21 years since Wikipedia started. This active community is what keeps Wikipedia as reliable as it is today—good, but not complete. More diverse contributors are needed to add more content to Wikipedia.

Some of that information has been added by college students from New England, written as a class assignment. The Wiki Education Foundation, small nonprofit, runs a program called the Wikipedia Student Program, in which we support college and university faculty who want to assign their students to write Wikipedia articles as part of their coursework.

Why do instructors assign their students to edit Wikipedia as a course assignment? Research shows a Wikipedia assignment increases motivation for students, while providing them learning objectives like critical thinking, research, writing for a public audience, evaluating and synthesizing sources and peer review. Especially important in today’s climate of misinformation and disinformation is the critical digital media literacy skills students gain from writing for Wikipedia, where they’re asked to consider and evaluate the reliability of the sources they’re citing. In addition to the benefits to student learning outcomes, instructors are also glad to see Wikipedia’s coverage of their discipline get better. And it does get better; studies such as this and this and this have shown the quality of content students add to Wikipedia is high.

Since 2010, more than 5,100 courses have participated in the program and more than 102,000 student editors have added more than 85 million words to Wikipedia. That’s 292,000 printed pages or the equivalent of 62 volumes of a printed encyclopedia. To put that in context, the last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica had only 32 volumes. That means Wikipedia Student Program participants have added nearly twice as much content as was in Britannica.

Students add to body of knowledge

It’s easy to think of Wikipedia as fairly complete if it gives you the answer you seek most of the time. But the ability for student editors to add those 85 million words exposes this assumption as false. Let’s examine some examples.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the public’s interest in vaccines and therapeutics has skyrocketed. Thanks to a Boston University School of Medicine student in Benjamin Wolozin’s Systems Pharmacology class in fall 2021, the article on reverse pharmacology has been overhauled. Before the student started working on it, the article was what’s known on Wikipedia as a stub—a short, incomplete article. Today, thanks to Dr. Wolozin’s student adding a dramatic 17,000 words to the article, it’s a comprehensive description of hypothesis-driven drug discovery.

Medical content is popular on Wikipedia. In fact, Wikipedia’s medical articles get more pageviews than the websites for the National Institutes of Health, WebMD, Mayo Clinic, the British National Health Service, the World Health Organization and UpToDate.

Student editors in Mary Mahoney’s History of Medicine class at Connecticut’s Trinity College improved a number of medical articles, including those on pediatrics, telehealth, pregnancy and Mary Mallon (better known as Typhoid Mary), to name just a few. In the handful of months since students improved these articles, they’ve been viewed more than 932,000 times. As many tenured professors who’ve taught with Wikipedia note, more people will read the outcomes of student work from their Wikipedia assignments than will read an entire corpus of academic publications.

Sometimes their work adds cultural relevance to existing articles. Take Gwen Kordonowy’s “Public Writing” course at Boston University. Before one of her students expanded the article on Xiangsheng, the traditional Chinese performance art, it covered Xiangsheng in mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia—but not in North America. The student added a section on Xiangsheng in North America, noting famous Canadian and American performers.

Many students study Dante’s Divine Comedy as part of their schoolwork, but have you considered the women Dante references? Until Wellesley College’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” class started working on their Wikipedia articles, you may not have been able to learn much more. The course, taught by Laura Ingallinella, focused on highlighting the women Dante referenced and improving their articles.

Diversifying perspectives

The Wellesley College example is a good one because it’s indicative of a larger challenge of gaps within Wikipedia. Wikipedia’s existing editor base is relatively homogenous: In Northern America, the diversity demographics are grim. Only 22 percent of Wikipedia contributors are women, which directly correlates to content gaps like the ones the Dante class tackled. The race and ethnicity gaps are even worse. Recent survey data revealed 89 percent of U.S. Wikipedia content contributors identify as white.

With an overwhelmingly white, male editor base, content coverage and perspectives can get skewed. That’s where Wiki Education’s work comes in. By empowering a diverse group of college students, the program is able to help shift Wikipedia’s contributor demographics. In Wiki Education’s programs, 67 percent of participants identify as women, and an additional 3 percent identify as non-binary or another gender identity. And only 55 percent of Wiki Education’s program participants identify as white.

By empowering higher education students to address Wikipedia’s content gaps as class assignments, Wiki Education is helping to diversify the contributors to Wikipedia too. Wikipedia’s mission—to collect the sum of all human knowledge—requires participation from a diverse population of participants. Initiatives like the ones run by Wiki Education are key to helping achieve that vision.

When we support higher education students to contribute their knowledge, the story told by Wikipedia becomes more accurate, representative and complete.

LiAnna Davis is chief programs officer at Wiki Education.

Chelsie Vokes: What will colleges do if Supreme Court bans affirmative action involving race?

At elite Williams College, in Williamstown, Mass.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

When President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson for the U.S. Supreme Court, it seemed like a major civil rights victory.

But that victory could feel like a bitter irony this fall, when the high court hears two cases that will likely obliterate affirmative action. If Jackson gets approved by the Senate, she will probably be making two divergent types of history in her first months on the court: being its first black female and hearing cases that could likely overturn 40 years of legal precedents involving race-conscious admissions.

The cases, one against Harvard and the other against the University of North Carolina, were both brought by Students for Fair Admissions (“SFFA”), an organization founded by conservative entrepreneur and long-time affirmative-action foe Ed Blum. If the Supreme Court rules in favor of the plaintiffs, as expected, colleges and universities would not only be barred from using race as a factor in admissions but also prohibited from knowing the race of applicants.

The decisions will likely force schools to completely revamp their admissions policies and rethink how to apply for education grants. Depending on the scope and content of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the decision could affect preferences for first-generation students and reverberate well beyond the realm of education, even jeopardizing grant programs for minority-owned businesses. These cases could also lead to further scrutiny of common practices such as legacy admissions.

In the University of North Carolina case, SFFA argues that whites and Asian American applicants were discriminated against because the university used race as a criterion for admissions. Previous Supreme Court cases had ruled that colleges could use race as one of several criteria for admissions, while prohibiting the use of racial quotas. But now, SFFA says those precedents are wrong and that using race as a criterion is illegal.

Harvard has a holistic process to determine admissions, that is, considering each candidate’s entire high school career and not looking at race as an explicit factor. However, SFFA argued that the subjective and vague nature of these holistic policies leaves room for implicit bias and consequently holds Asian American applicants to a far higher standard than white applicants. In support of its argument, the SFFA questioned why Harvard admits the same percentage of Black, Hispanic, white and Asian American students each year, even though application rates for each racial group differ significantly over time. SFFA says that Harvard must design a new race-blind admissions system.

The court hasn’t issued any opinions on affirmative action since June 2016, which was before Donald Trump was elected president and eventually secured three staunchly conservative appointments to the bench. Unless something unexpected occurs in the next year, it seems likely that the court will ban affirmative action.

The legal change could have huge implications for colleges and universities. If affirmative action is struck down, many colleges will need to overhaul their admissions practices. More than 100 public colleges currently use race as an admissions factor and 59 of the top 100 private colleges consider race as well, according to data from the College Board reported by Ballotpedia. Numerous other colleges that don’t consider race may need to determine whether their admissions policies disproportionally affect one race over others—a big undertaking that could require protracted and complicated analyses.

Colleges believe that diversity is critical to the spread of ideas. But without any race-conscious admissions policies, it’s likely that there will be substantially fewer minorities on many campuses. Past affirmative action bans decreased Black student enrollment by as much as 25% and Hispanic student enrollment by nearly 20%, according to a 2012 study cited by the Civil Rights Project. These bans discourage minority applicants and don’t even result in better academically credentialed student bodies. The Civil Rights Project also reported that SAT math scores dropped by 25 points after such bans.

If the court bans affirmative action, though, colleges and universities can find other methods to create the diverse campuses they desire. Like private employers, who generally can’t consider race in hiring, they could work to expand their applicant pool and encourage minorities to apply. They might also develop increased financial aid and other support programs to boost access to education.

States looking for a race-neutral alternative may follow the lead of Texas, which guarantees public university admission to all students who graduated in the top 10% of their high school classes. However, it is still unclear whether this approach really increases diversity.

Colleges and universities will be able to find ways to preserve—and boost—diversity on their campuses. But they should not wait until the court issues what will likely be a landmark affirmative action decision in the spring of 2023. Colleges and universities will need to make sweeping changes to admissions policies. They need to start preparing now.

Chelsie Vokes is a labor, employment and higher education lawyer with Bowditch & Dewey LLP, in Boston.

George McCully: Can academics build safe partnership between humans and now-running-out-of-control artificial intelligence?

— Graphic by GDJ

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org), based in Boston

Review

The Age of AI and our Human Future, by Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher, with Schuyler Schouten, New York, Little, Brown and Co., 2021.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is engaged in overtaking and surpassing our long-traditional world of natural and human intelligence. In higher education, AI apps and their uses are multiplying—in financial and fiscal management, fundraising, faculty development, course and facilities scheduling, student recruitment campaigns, student success management and many other operations.

The AI market is estimated to have an average annual growth rate of 34% over the next few years—to reach $170 billion by 2025, more than doubling to $360 billion by 2028, reports Inside Higher Education.

Congress is only beginning to take notice, but we are told that 2022 will be a “year of regulation” for high tech in general. U.S. Sen. Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is introducing a bill to establish a national defense “Cyber Academy” on the model of our other military academies, to make up for lost time by recruiting and training a globally competitive national high-tech defense and public service corps. Many private and public entities are issuing reports declaring “principles” that they say should be instituted as human-controlled guardrails on AI’s inexorable development.

But at this point, we see an extremely powerful and rapidly advancing new technology that is outrunning human control, with no clear resolution in sight. To inform the public of this crisis, and ring alarm bells on the urgent need for our concerted response, this book has been co-produced by three prominent leaders—historian and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; former CEO and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt; and MacArthur Foundation Chairman Daniel Huttenlocher, who is the inaugural dean of MIT’s new College of Computer Science, responsible for thoroughly transforming MIT with AI.

I approach the book as a historian, not a technologist. I have contended for several years that we are living in a rare “Age of Paradigm Shifts,” in which all fields are simultaneously being transformed, in this case, by the IT revolution of computers and the internet. Since 2019, I have suggested that there have been only three comparably transformative periods in the roughly 5,000 years of Western history; the first was the rise of Classical civilization in ancient Greece, the second was the emergence of medieval Christianity after the fall of Rome, and the third was the secularizing early-modern period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, driven by Gutenberg’s IT revolution of printing on paper with movable type, which laid the foundations of modern Western culture. The point of these comparisons is to illuminate the depth, spread and power of such epochs, to help us navigate them successfully.

The Age of AI proposes a more specific hypothesis, independently confirming that ours is indeed an age of paradigm shifts in every field, driven by the IT revolution, and further declaring that this next period will be driven and defined by the new technology of “artificial intelligence” or “machine learning”—rapidly superseding “modernity” and currently outrunning human control, with unforeseeable results.

The argument

For those not yet familiar with it, an elegant example of AI at work is described in the book’s first chapter, summarizing “Where We Are.” AlphaZero is an AI chess player. Computers (Deep Blue, Stockfish) had already defeated human grandmasters, programmed by inputting centuries of championship games, which the machines then rapidly scan for previously successful plays. AlphaZero was given only the rules of chess—which pieces move which ways, with the object of capturing the opposing king. It then taught itself in four hours how to play the game and has since defeated all computer and human players. Its style and strategies of play are, needless to say, unconventional; it makes moves no human has ever tried—for example, more sacrificing of valuable pieces—and turns those into successes that humans could neither foresee nor resist. Grandmasters are now studying AlphaZero’s games to learn from them. Garry Kasparov, former world champion, says that after a thousand years of human play, “chess has been shaken to its roots by AlphaZero.”

A humbler example that may be closer to home is Google’s mapped travel instructions. This past month I had to drive from one turnpike to another in rural New York; three routes were proposed, and the one I chose twisted and turned through un-numbered, un-signed, often very brief passages, on country roads that no humans on their own could possibly identify as useful. AI had spontaneously found them by reading road maps. The revolution is already embedded in our cellphones, and the book says “AI promises to transform all realms of human experience. … The result will be a new epoch,” which it cannot yet define.

Their argument is systematic. From “Where We Are,” the next two chapters—”How We Got Here” and “From Turing to Today”—take us from the Greeks to the geeks, with a tipping point when the material realm in which humans have always lived and reasoned was augmented by electronic digitization—the creation of the new and separate realm we now call “cyberspace.” There, where physical distance and time are eliminated as constraints, communication and operation are instantaneous, opening radically new possibilities.

One of those with profound strategic significance is the inherent proclivity of AI, freed from material bonds, to grow its operating arenas into “global network platforms”—such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, et al. Because these transcend geographic, linguistic, temporal and related traditional boundaries, questions arise: Whose laws can regulate them? How might any regulations be imposed, maintained and enforced? We have no answers yet.

Perhaps the most acute illustration of the danger here is with the field of geopolitics—national and international security, “the minimum objective of … organized society.” A beautifully lucid chapter concisely summarizes the history of these fields, and how they were successfully managed to deal with the most recent development of unprecedented weapons of mass destruction through arms control treaties between antagonists. But in the new world of cyberspace, “the previously sharp lines drawn by geography and language will continue to dissolve.”

Furthermore, the creation of global network platforms requires massive computing power only achievable by the wealthiest and most advanced governments and corporations, but their proliferation and operation are possible for individuals with handheld devices using software stored in thumb drives. This makes it currently impossible to monitor, much less regulate, power relationships and strategies. Nation-states may become obsolete. National security is in chaos.

The book goes on to explore how AI will influence human nature and values. Westerners have traditionally believed that humans are uniquely endowed with superior intelligence, rationality and creative self-development in education and culture; AI challenges all that with its own alternative and in some ways demonstrably superior intelligence. Thus, “the role of human reason will change.”

That looks especially at us higher educators. AI is producing paradigm shifts not only in our various separate disciplines but in the practice of research and science itself, in which models are derived not from theories but from previous practical results. Scholars and scientists can be told the most likely outcomes of their research at the conception stage, before it has practically begun. “This portends a shift in human experience more significant than any that has occurred for nearly six centuries …,” that is, since Gutenberg and the Scientific Revolution.

Moreover, a crucial difference today is the rapidity of transition to an “age of AI.” Whereas it took three centuries to modernize Europe from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, today’s radically transformative period began in the late 20th Century and has spread globally in just decades, owing to the vastly greater power of our IT revolution. Now whole subfields can be transformed in months—as in the cases of cryptocurrencies, blockchains, the cloud and NFTs (non-fungible tokens). With robotics and the “metaverse” of virtual reality now capable of affecting so many aspects of life beginning with childhood, the relation of humans to machines is being transformed.

The final chapter addresses AI and the future. “If humanity is to shape the future, it needs to agree on common principles that guide each choice.” There is a critical need for “explaining to non-technologists what AI is doing, as well as what it ‘knows’ and how.” That is why this book was written. The chapter closes with a proposal for a national commission to ensure our competitiveness in the future of the field, which is by no means guaranteed.

Evaluation

The Age of AI makes a persuasive case that AI is a transformative break from the past and sufficiently powerful to be carrying the world into a new “epoch” in history, comparable to that which produced modern Western secular culture. It advances the age-of-paradigm-shifts-analysis by specifying that the driver is not just the IT revolution in general, but its particular expression in machine learning, or artificial intelligence. I have called our current period the “Transformation” to contrast it with the comparable but retrospective “Renaissance” (rebirth of Classical civilization) and “Reformation” (reviving Christianity’s original purity and power). Now we are looking not to the past but to a dramatically new and indefinite future.

The book is also right to focus on our current lack of controls over this transformation as posing an urgent priority for concerted public attention. The authors are prudent to describe our current transformation by reference to its means, its driving technology, rather than to its ends or any results it will produce, since those are unforeseeable. My calling it a “Transformation” does the same, stopping short of specifying our next, post-modern, period of history.

That said, the book would have been strengthened by giving due credit to the numerous initiatives already attempting to define guiding principles as a necessary prerequisite to asserting human control. Though it says we “have yet to define its organizing principles, moral concepts, or aspirations and limitations,” it is nonetheless true that the extreme speed and global reach of today’s transformations have already awakened leading entrepreneurs, scholars and scientists to its dangers.

A 2020 Report from Harvard and MIT provides a comparison of 35 such projects. One of the most interesting is “The One-Hundred-Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100),” an endowed international multidisciplinary and multisector project launched in 2014 to publish reports every five years on AI’s influences on people, their communities and societies; two lengthy and detailed reports have already been issued, in 2016 and 2021. Our own government’s Department of Defense in 2019 published a discussion of guidelines for national security, and the Office of Technology and Science Policy is gathering information to create an “AI Bill of Rights.”

But while various public and private entities pledge their adherence to these principles in their own operations, voluntary enforcement is a weakness, so the assertion of the book that AI is running out of control is probably justified.

Principles and values must qualify and inform the algorithms shaping what kind of world we want ourselves and our descendants to live in. There is no consensus yet on those, and it is not likely that there will be soon given the deep divisions in cultures of public and private AI development, so intense negotiation is urgently needed for implementation, which will be far more difficult than conception.

This is where the role of academics becomes clear. We need to beware that when all fields are in paradigm shifts simultaneously, adaptation and improvisation become top priorities. Formulating future directions must be fundamental and comprehensive, holistic with inclusive specialization, the opposite of the multiversity’s characteristically fragmented exclusive specialization to which we have been accustomed.
Traditional academic disciplines are now fast becoming obsolete as our major problems—climate control, bigotries, disparities of wealth, pandemics, political polarization—are not structured along academic disciplinary lines. Conditions must be created that will be conducive to integrated paradigms. Education (that is, self-development of who we shall be) and training (that is, knowledge and skills development for what we shall be) must be mutual and complementary, not separated as is now often the case. Only if the matrix of future AI is humanistic will we be secure.

In that same inclusive spirit, perhaps another book is needed to explore the relations between the positive and negative directions in all this. Our need to harness artificial intelligence for constructive purposes presents an unprecedented opportunity to make our own great leap forward. If each of our fields is inevitably going to be transformed, a priority for each of us is to climb aboard—to pitch in by helping to conceive what artificial intelligence might ideally accomplish. What might be its most likely results when our fields are “shaken to their roots” by machines that have with lightning speed taught themselves how to play our games, building not on our conventions but on innovations they have invented for themselves?

I’d very much like to know, for example, what will be learned in “synthetic biology” and from a new, comprehensive cosmology describing the world as a coherent whole, ordered by natural laws. We haven’t been able to make these discoveries yet on our own, but AI will certainly help. As these authors say, “Technology, strategy, and philosophy need to be brought into some alignment” requiring a partnership between humans and AI. That can only be achieved if academics rise above their usual restraints to play a crucial role.

George McCully is a historian, former professor and faculty dean at higher education institutions in the Northeast, professional philanthropist and founder and CEO of the Catalogue for Philanthropy.

The Infinite Corridor is the primary passageway through the campus, in Cambridge, of MIT, a world center of artificial intelligence research and development.

Hannah Leighton: The growing farm-to-campus movement in New England

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

“Farm to campus” is a growing movement to mobilize the influence and power of colleges and universities to shape the food system. Research done before the COVID-19 pandemic shows that New England colleges with dining services served more than 87 million meals and spent nearly $400 million on food and beverage annually. Decisions about what food to buy, where to buy it and from whom help shape supply chains, affect the health and nutrition of those eating at the institutions, and can support the communities of which the institutions are an integral part. In addition, colleges and universities are educating and shaping opportunities for future food systems leaders, food businesses and food consumers.

Farm to Institution New England (FINE) works with the higher-education sector to better understand and help shape the role higher ed plays in our food system. The pandemic has hugely impacted college dining and food systems work. Campuses face supply-chain disruptions, staff shortages, closed dining halls and new levels of food insecurity in their communities. But as they have grappled with these disruptions over the past two years, they have also leaned on the years of partnership and collaboration with local food partners to get through this trying time. For FINE and our partners, we know that in order to continue building this foundation, we must ground our work in evidence and understanding of the changes.

As FINE and our campus partners geared up to assess the current state of farm-to-campus activity in the six New England states, we developed an innovative approach to data collection and sharing. This month we are launching the New England Farm and Sea to Campus Data Center, a new system for collecting, measuring and reporting farm-to-campus work.

The Data Center will be the one-stop shop for New England colleges to aggregate information about farm-to-campus efforts, generate reports, measure progress over time, network with other campuses, and more.

The Data Center will build on and streamline the data-collection process and decentralize data ownership across multiple stakeholders.

Multiple campus stakeholders will be able to enter data specific to their area of the food system. This includes:

• Dining directors, managers and chefs

• Campus farm managers

• Food access/security leaders on campus (e.g., food pantry, student union, student-led food justice organizations).

Campuses will find questions about their general dining services, regional and sustainable food procurement, campus farms, food security efforts, tracking and traceability, community engagement and more. They will be able to share their results with administrators and other stakeholders while also benchmarking themselves in the region and finding new partners.

New England colleges with dining services can expect to receive an email in January with further instructions on how to log in and get started. In the meantime …

Get data points ready. FINE will start collecting them this month.

Get tracking support as you’re collecting your data. The beta version of FINE’s new purchase tracker is available free to anyone looking for support with their regional and values-based procurement tracking. It even comes with a handy calculator. More functionality coming soon (Google or Excel).

View a demo and find other resources on FINE’s website.

Over the coming year, the Data Center will also be where FINE hosts analyses and summary data, interactive dashboards and other opportunities for policymakers, funders, researchers and farm-to-institution stakeholders to better understand the landscape we’re trying to positively impact. While this beta version is being launched in the campus sector, other institutions will eventually be able to use this space to network, find supply chain partners and see how their activities compare with others in the region.

FINE has collected data from New England colleges with dining services via survey since 2015. These surveys have resulted in two reports: “Campus Dining 101: Benchmark Study of Farm to College in New England” and “Campus Dining 201: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities for Farm to College in New England.” Findings from these efforts have informed regional funders, policy makers, researchers and others who support farm-to-institution projects across New England.

Hannah Leighton is director of research and evaluation at Farm to Institution New England. 

Thomas A. Barnico: Should Feds dictate rules on campus sexual misconduct? Beware

“My Eyes Clear Away Clouds” (collage), by Timothy Harney, a professor at the Montserrat College of Art, in Beverly, Mass.

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The U.S. Department of Education is poised to reverse Trump-era rules governing claims of sexual misconduct on campus. One could forgive weary college counsel for a case of vertigo: The Trump rules themselves reversed the Obama rules, and Biden’s 2021 nominee to enforce the rules—Catherine Lhamon—held the same office at the Education Department under Obama. In three years, the election of 2024 may bring yet another volte-face at the department. Even those who support the likely Biden changes may wonder: Is this any way to run a government?

As they ponder that question, frustrated counsel should note the primary source of the problem: the desire by serial federal officials to dictate hotly contested standards of student conduct for millions of students in thousands of colleges in a nation of 330 million people.

Some issues are better left to the provincials. As Duke Law professors Margaret Lemos and Ernest Young argue: “Federalism can mitigate the effects of [national] political polarization by offering alternative policymaking venues in which the hope of consensus politics is more plausible.” Delegation to state or local governments or, in education, to private actors, can “operate as an important safety valve in polarized times, lowering the temperature on contentious national policy debates.”

Of course, as Lemos and Young admit, “a federalism-based modus vivendi is unlikely to satisfy devoted partisans on one side or another of any divisive issue.” Such conflicts pit competing and compelling interests against one another.

In the Title IX context, parties fiercely debate the adequacy of protections for complainants and respondents alike: Does the respondent have a right to confront and cross-examine the complainant? Does the respondent have a right to counsel in their meeting with student affairs personnel? Do colleges and universities have to abide by a common definition of “consent” to intimacy in their student conduct manuals?

And, in polarized times, many will be unsatisfied with a patchwork of rules that apply state-by-state or college-by-college. Lost in this good-faith debate is the point that, even for issues with national effects, an oscillating national rule can cause more instability than an entrenched array of differing local rules.

Noted diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan aptly described the problem in Round the Cragged Hill: “The greater a country is, and the more it attempts to solve great social problems from the center by sweeping legislative and judicial norms, the greater the number of inevitable harshnesses and injustices, and the less the intimacy between the rulers and ruled. … The tendency, in great countries, is to take recourse to sweeping solutions, applying across the board to all elements of the population.” Central dictates, Kennan said, often show “diminished sensitivity of … laws and regulations to the particular needs, traditional, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and the like, of individual localities and communities.”

Of course, changes in administrations often bring changes in policy. Elections matter, and victors arrive with fresh ideas and an appetite for change. This is a highly democratic impulse; as U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote: “A change in administration brought about by the people casting their votes is a perfectly reasonable basis for an executive agency’s reappraisal of the costs and benefits of it programs and regulations.”

Sometimes, such reappraisals will follow a reversal in the public current of the times. Where the new current runs strong and fast—and newly elected officials carry a decisive electoral mandate—a sweeping national solution may reflect a consensus view. But when electoral margins are slim, dangers lurk. When national executive and legislative power repeatedly changes hands by slim margins, policy changes may reflect not strong new currents but more of a series of quick, jolting bends.

The shifting procedural rights of the complainants and respondents in the Title IX misconduct hearings more resemble the latter. The abruptness of such changes grows when the commands flow not from a congressional act but by “executive order,” administrative “guidance,” or “Dear Colleague” letters that lack the procedural protections of a statute passed by both houses of Congress. Moreover, too-frequent changes in rules—whatever their procedural sources—have long been seen to create uncertainty, undermine compliance and lessen respect for law.

The options for beleaguered college counsel are few. Education Department rules apply to colleges because colleges desire federal funds. Few colleges wish to turn off the spout of the federal Leviathan. The masters they acquire are both the sovereign Leviathan of Hobbes and the whale dreamed by Herman Melville in Moby-Dick: a giant of the deep that pulls colleges to and fro, as if dragging them in a whaleboat on a “Nantucket Sleigh Ride.”

In our modern form of the tale, the whaleboat is the college, and the harpoon is its application for federal funding. The harpoon hits its rich federal target, but the prize brings conditions, represented by the attached rope. “Hemp only can kill me,” Ahab prophesizes. “The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove;—ran foul.” The rope—initially coiled neatly in a corner of the whaleboat—runs out smoothly until spent. Then it tangles, converting itself to a weapon more deadly than the harpoon. Bound by the rope—the conditions on federal funding—the college descends into the vortex.

Biden’s likely Title IX rules on student misconduct will pull college administrators to and fro again, whalers on a new, hard ride. The day that the federal government withdraws from the field seems distant; like Ahab, Education Department officials of both parties seem “on rails.” In the meantime, college counsel should brace for the latest chase and hope that they—like Ishmael—will live to tell the tale.

Thomas A. Barnico teaches at Boston College Law School. He is a former Massachusetts assistant attorney general (1981-2010).

“Nantucket Sleigh Ride”: Illustration of the dangers of the "whale fishery" in 1820. Note the taut ropes on the right, lines leading from the open boats to the harpooned animal.

John O. Harney: New England and other experts address racial and economic reckoning'

Logo of the Color of Change reform group

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Even in this time when people presume to be having a “racial reckoning,” signs of enduring racial inequity pop up everywhere. From nagging disparities in health—Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) die at higher rates than other groups from COVID-19 and are underrepresented in medical research (except in vile experiments such as in the Tuskegee study) … to the steep declines in Black and Latino students submitting the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) … to Black food-service workers experiencing disproportionate short-tipping for enforcing social-distancing rules … inequality reigns. These persistent forces should be a big deal for New England’s Historically White Colleges and Universities, which are rarely called out as HWCUs.

Some help is on the way. Beside targeting $128.6 billion for the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, $39.6 billion to the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund, $39 billion for child care and $1 billion for Head Start, the new $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan does other less visible things to begin to address structural racism. For example, the package provides Black farmers with debt relief and help acquiring land. Black farmers lost more than 12 million acres of farmland over the past century, attributed to systemic racism and inequitable access to markets.

I’ve been trying to monitor the racial-equity conversation mostly via Zoom since the pandemic began. This mention of aid to Black farmers reminded me of something I heard Chuck Collins say at a webinar convened last month by MIT’s Sloan School of Management via Zoom titled “The Inclusive Innovation Economy: Amplifying Our Voices Through Public Policy’’.

Collins is the director of inequality and the common good at the Institute for Policy Studies and a white man. He told of his uncle getting a 1 percent fixed-rate mortgage in 1949 to buy an Ohio farm—a public investment that led his cousins to get on “America’s wealth-building train.” Black and Brown people did not get the same benefits. Collins suggested that systems such as CARES relief should be examined with a racial-equity lens, as should policies such as raising the minimum wage or forgiving student loans. Unquestionably, Black students struggle more than whites with student debt. But with Capitol Hill debating the right amount of debt to forgive, Collins suggested we need to test how well these changes would affect racial inequity.

Dynastic wealth

Noting that we’re living through an updraft of “dynastic wealth,” Collins asked why the U.S. taxes work income higher than income from investments. He pointed out that “50 families in the U.S. that are now in their third generation of billionaires coming online and that represents a sort of Democracy-distorting and market-distorting concentration of wealth and power.”

That distortion could be partly cushioned with a “dignity floor,” said Collins. “It’s not a coincidence that a society like Denmark has much higher rates of entrepreneurship than the U.S. per capita because they have a social-safety net and because they have social investments that create a decency floor through which people cannot all. So if you want to start a business, you know you can take that leap and not end up living in your car.”

We need to disrupt the narrative of “everyone is where they deserve to be,” said Collins. So many entrepreneurs tell their story from the standpoint of I did this. We need to talk about the web of supports and multigenerational advantages behind their ability to take the step they took.

Color-coded

An audience member asked if a bridge could be built to connect the rich and poor. To this, one of the conversation moderators, Sloan School lecturer and former chief experience and culture officer at Berkshire Bank Malia Lazu, quipped that in the U.S., there’s another dimension: The sides of the bridge are “color-coded.”

Lazu and co-moderator Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and inclusion at Sloan, agreed that ironically this is how the policies were designed to work. That’s why we need to change how the systems are wired.

It’s not that Black people are less likely to get loans from banks, but that banks are less likely to give loans to Black people, explained Color of Change President Rashad Robinson. Shifting the subject that way, he said, has led to remedies like financial literacy programs for Black people, rather than changes in the policies of big banks.

Color of Change was formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, like COVID-19, disproportionately hurt Black and Brown people. Narrative is not static, Robinson said, reminding the audience of what people might have unabashedly said in the workplace about LGBT people just 15 years ago.

Moreover, budgets are “moral documents,” Robinson pointed out. So if you say you’re going to prosecute more corruption crimes than street crime, that has to be reflected in budgets. People of color are not vulnerable, they’ve been targeted, added Robinson, who is working on a report that will look at not only Black pain, but also Black joy and how BIPOC are portrayed in stories on TV.

An audience questioner asked which policies actually embed structural racism. Lazu pointed to the U.S. Constitution’s original clause declaring that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual. For a more modern example, Robinson noted minimum-wage laws that exclude certain kinds of work, originally farm workers and domestic workers, now work usually done by people of color and women. Structural racism is rooted in how our economy is designed, said Robinson. “An equity focus means we’re not just trying to undo harm but we’re trying to create systems and structures that actually move us forward.”

Afraid to bring children into the world

Also last month, the Boston Social Venture Partners convened a Zoom webinar with affiliates in San Antonio and Denver to discuss how nonprofit leaders have struggled to implement strategies that funders require for diversity, equity and inclusion.

The conversation was moderated by Michael Smith, executive director of the Obama Foundation’s My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, based in Washington, D.C. The alliance was created in 2014 in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin and aimed at addressing opportunity gaps. It works today against the backdrop of the COVID pandemic and resulting school closures, an economic downturn and police violence in communities of color.

Another Obama fellow, Charles Daniels, the executive director of Boston-based Father’s Uplift, explained: “We have a shortage of clinicians of color in this country—sound, qualified  therapists who are able to provide that necessary guidance,” he said. “One of the main requests of single mothers bringing their children to us or fathers entering our agency is that they want a clinician of color, someone who looks like them,” he said. “There are conversations they don’t know necessarily how to have with their loved ones about racism, about oppression, about maintaining their dignity and self-respect.”

Daniels noted that constituents are grappling with what to tell sons about getting pulled over by the police and daughters about what their school may say about hairstyles. “These are conversations that people of color dread this day and age. They wake up trying to parent their inner child and also parent the child who they brought into this world.” He notes that some constituents are actually afraid of having children for these reasons.

A young Black man told Daniels that if he had a choice to be white, he would take it: “I wouldn’t have to worry about my life every time I go to school,” the child suggested, or “an administrator being on my back in school because she’s assuming I’m not doing my work because I don’t care as opposed to me not being able to feed my stomach because I’m hungry.” Daniels said these are real-life situations that young men and single mothers struggle with on a daily basis.

When the federal government recently sent relief stipends, many men of color were left out for not paying child support as if they just didn’t want to pay, when the real reason was they couldn’t afford it.

Growing up as a person of color, you’re taught that you have to be near perfect. You can’t get away with things other populations can, said Daniels. He added: “If someone of color who you’re vetting sends an email with an error, it doesn’t mean they’re incompetent; it probably means they’re doing more than one thing or wearing two hats.” He said he likes funders who offer technical support, as well as authentic conversation, and who don’t avoid the word “racism.”

Giant triplets

Meanwhile, the Quincy Institute, led by retired U.S. Army colonel and noted critic of the Iraq War-turned Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, held a virtual “Emergency Summit” of public intellectuals to reflect on America Besieged by Racism, Materialism and Militarism—the “giant triplets” identified by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam.”

Against the backdrop of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, Bacevich began by asking the panelists how those triplets continue to threaten democracy.

One panelist, New York Times contributing writer Peter Beinart, noted that one of the triplets, materialism, while an enormous cultural problem, might not rank as one of the three main ones today because, unlike in the 1960s when people assumed that American living standards would be going up, many today suffer from a lack of materialism and hold very little hope that their situations will improve.

Militarism and racism, however, do persist. As a foreign-policy term, however, “militarist” has been replaced by euphemisms such as “muscular” or “tough-minded.” But militarism is plain to see in the degree to which domestic policing has been affected by military equipment, and veterans return home without decent healthcare. (As an aside, the military has been lauded for well-run coronavirus vaccine sites while the civilian counterparts are often cast as failures. Asked why this is on a recent television news show, Alex Pareene, a staff writer for The New Republic, offered a simple explanation: The U.S. has never disinvested in the military.)

One panelist, the Rev. Liz Theoharis, who is co-chair with Rev. William Barber, of the Poor People’s Campaign, said she would add to King’s triplets, two more demons: ecological devastation and emboldened religious nationalism evidenced on Jan. 6.

Regarding militarism, Theoharis noted that while there’s no military draft per se, there is a “poverty draft” because for many young people, it’s the only way to put food on their table and get an education. Yet, they come home to a lack of opportunity. The majority of single male adults that are homeless in our society are veterans. The military system is “not about the ideals of a democracy and opportunity and possibility and freedom for all, it’s sending poor people, Black people and Latino people to go and fight and kill poor people in other parts of the world,” she said, noting that the U.S. has military bases in more than 800 places. The coronavirus threat has spread in the fissures that we faced before in terms of racism and inequality, which were already claiming lives before the pandemic.

Neta C. Crawford, a professor and chair of political science at Boston University, said democracy is the antidote to militarism, extreme materialism and racism. Members of Congress are tightly connected to military bases and defense contractors in their districts based on the belief that the military-industrial complex creates good jobs. Crawford said we need break this misconception with solid analysis that shows military spending actually produces fewer jobs and what we could be doing instead.

Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative, noted the irony that U.S. military adventures abroad are framed as antiracist. When he opposed the Iraq War, he was accused of being against Arab democracy and therefore racist. He lamented that we need to find something for the part of industrial America that has been declining, not necessarily related to militarism but to make things that people want to buy.

Justice and belonging in New England

This webinar surfing spree came as NEBHE renewed its focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. The terms “justice” and “belonging” are sometimes also added to the collection of values that used to be disparaged as so much p.c. Moreover, “diversity” is not enough on its own because, as one New England college president recently told his colleagues, people can feel welcomed but also disadvantaged. NEBHE has also looked at the concept of “reparative” justice as a way to recognize that fighting racial oppression should not be responsive to specific past wrongs, but rather, driven by the understanding that the past, present and future exist together.

To be sure, New England will thrive only if its education systems promote inclusion and excellence for learners of all backgrounds, cultures, age groups, lifestyles and learning styles in an environment that promotes justice and equity in a diverse, multicultural world.

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Todd J. Leach: Colleges must figure out how to survive after the pandemic

At the Keene (N.H.)State College campus, left to right: President's House, Morrison Hall, Parker Hall

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID-19 crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost revenues, while harder to measure, were just as impactful.

The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports a 22% drop in students going directly from high school to college. With an estimated 30 million people out of work, part-time enrollments and lower-priced community colleges were affected sharply. Four-year institutions may have experienced smaller overall enrollment drops than the community colleges, but the combination of fewer students in residence halls and significantly higher costs associated with those students who did choose to live on campus, had a dramatic negative impact on auxiliary revenues.

Given the gloomy financial realities of both 2019 and 2020 it may be somewhat surprising how few colleges permanently closed their doors as a result. It might be tempting to believe the worst of the financial woes for higher education will soon be over once the vaccine brings an end to the pandemic, but that sigh of relief would be premature.

The federal relief provided to higher education was ultimately less than a third of what the ACE was requesting. Many states augmented that aid further with state-allocated CARES funding, but there remains a financial gap that institutions have to address in other ways. Many of the approaches used to cover that gap will have lasting impact and make the future for many colleges more challenging than it already was.

Tapping into reserves or endowments, furloughs and layoffs, increases in deferred maintenance, salary cuts and freezes, and other short-term fixes may have helped institutions manage through the crisis but they will have to be made up for at some point. It may turn out that COVID has a delayed impact on the survivability of many institutions that relied on these short-term measures as opposed to addressing more substantially those structural costs that better support long-term sustainability in the face of continuing demographic declines and intensifying competition.

Already squeezed

Higher education was already in the midst of challenging times and COVID’s biggest impact may be how it accelerates the need for structural change and the rethinking of the student experience. The long-term demographic picture, as forecast by Nathan Grawe among others, shows many years of declining enrollments ahead, capped off at the end of the 2020s by, what Grawe himself described in a January 2018 interview with Inside Higher Ed, as a “free fall.” For those of us in the Northeast, the predicted loss in four-year college going students is about 4,000 per year for the next decade.

Institutions that thought they could weather the predicted 1% to 2% annual demographic decline as they incrementally rethought and restructured over the course of several years may no longer have the luxury of time. In fact, those institutions that solely focused on the short-term challenge of COVID may have weakened their ability to respond to the long-term threats. The loss (or disenfranchising) of key talent, the spending of strategic reserves, and the increased backlog of deferred maintenance will all make it much more challenging to make the bold strategic changes and investments it will take to compete in a post-COVID environment.

It may be many years before families fully recover economically, and it is highly likely that states will have fewer funds available for higher education going forward, at least without federal level support. These financial constraints will make it highly unlikely that institutions will be able to make up for the COVID impacts by raising tuition or advocating for higher levels of state support. In fact, the discounting wars can be expected to accelerate, rather than cease, as institutions compete more heavily over a smaller pool students simultaneously facing deeper financial challenges.

Some leaders may find comfort in the fact that many of their peer institutions will be in the same situation and that some shakeout may help address the supply side of the equation, but that is not likely to provide any immediate post-COVID relief. It might also be tempting to believe that the massive migration to remote learning that was necessitated by the pandemic has now jumpstarted a new revenue stream that will carry institutions into the future. The reality is that very few institutions that served a residential population with remote technology have attracted a truly online audience, and they are not likely to, without substantial investment in marketing, extended-hour support services and instructional design. The “Field of Dreams” approach no longer works in a saturated online market and it will take more than streaming lectures or putting classes on the latest LMS to be competitive in online markets.

While higher education may be facing precarious times, the value and need for it has never been greater, and surely, there will be institutions that thrive post-COVID. According to Grawe’s demographic analysis, we can expect highly selective institutions to continue to attract students, and even experience higher demand. I don’t believe the COVID crisis has any particular impact on this prediction. For small and regional institutions, however, I believe the COVID crisis has brought an imminent shakeout closer to the forefront for all the reasons identified above. Nonetheless, post-COVID will also be a period of opportunity for those institutions that have either incorporated long-term plans into their COVID decisions or are prepared to move beyond incremental change and move rapidly towards a rethink of both costs and the student experience.

Short-term cutting vs long-term investment

In an ideal situation, institutions would have already begun planning for long-term cost restructuring prior to the pandemic and, therefore, have simply accelerated those plans, rather than needing to take short-term cost-cutting measures that hinder long-term investment and success. However, for those institutions that had not begun addressing their cost structures, the urgency to do so should be strategic and immediate. Not all the competitors that emerge from the pandemic are going to be in the same place, and those that address their actual cost structure will have the ability to further lower price or, just as importantly, redirect dollars to initiatives that will have an impact on retention and enrollment.

Cost restructuring is only one part of the equation: Rethinking the student experience should also be a post-pandemic priority. Based on a variety of surveys, it seems clear that residential students may not have been entirely happy with their remote experiences. But might they still value the flexibility of one or two online classes that free up an early morning or a Friday? Can we better leverage physical classroom time if that classroom time can be augmented with more remote content? Will students who have become accustomed to remote advising and telehealth want to return to lines, or running across campus for a 15-minute appointment? Colleges that are planning to return to where they left off will miss the opportunity to become more “student-centered.” They will also be in danger of disenfranchising their students, not to mention faculty and staff who have also become accustomed to doing more remotely.

There are other ways to leverage the process and technology enhancements that were made to cope with COVID to also improve the student experience going forward, and ultimately provide some competitive advantage. These may include expanding student options through cross-institution collaborations and course sharing. While some institutions will not be prepared to survive post-COVID, for others, this is going to be a period of change and improvement. The difference will come down to the ability and willingness to go beyond incremental, not only in terms of cost reductions but also in terms of advancing the student experience and addressing changes in the market, all while remaining true to the core ethos of the institution. Simply renegotiating a few vendor contracts or migrating an additional program or two to online will not be enough to compete in a post-COVID era for most institutions.

Todd J. Leach is chancellor emeritus of the University System of New Hampshire and former chairman of The New England Board of Higher Education.

Thomas G. Mortenson: How to address America's crisis in higher education

Boston College, which is not in Boston but in Chestnut Hill, Mass., and is, like Dartmouth College, a university

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

Something inside me keeps saying: I told you something like this would happen. After 50 years studying opportunity for higher education, I am somewhat comfortable (and very uncomfortable too) saying the issues I have sought to address and warned about underlie the current political chaos. Our failures to address them (and I include higher education centrally in “our”) have boiled over:

1) Income inequality has been surging unchecked for decades. Among the 36 countries that are members of Organization of Economic Cooperation, the U.S. ranks third highest in income inequality. Income is being increasingly concentrated, which means that a growing share of the nation’s prosperity is being concentrated in a shrinking share of the population. With a growing share of the population left out, they have turned to Mr. Trump who had promised to turn the clock back and make America great again. Whatever you and I may think of him, we should remember that 74 million angry people voted for him in the last election.

2) Men’s lives have been falling apart for many decades. We celebrate the success of women and ignore the plight of men. Men have been disengaging from the labor force, from family life, from civic engagement. Our incarceration rates are the highest in the world. And suicide rates among younger males have been exploding. The central problem for men is the shift in employment from goods production to service provision. Men dominated goods production, and women have taken advantage of the growth in service provision employment, particularly through higher education. For every 100 women who earn a bachelor’s degree, 74 men do.

3) Higher education is the engine of division, enriching the rich and leaving everyone else out. From my most recent update, about 13% of children born into the bottom quartile of family income will complete a bachelor’s degree by age 24. About 62% of children born into the top quartile will complete a bachelor’s degree by the same age. This gap has grown substantially since 1970 when I started this data analysis. The bachelor’s degree has become the dividing line between people who are moving forward and people who are moving backward in the economy.

4) As a matter of public policy, I believe that selective college admissions should be replaced with a random draw lottery for admissions. The whole selective college admissions system is outright class warfare. Colleges should remain free to practice selective admissions—but at the price of losing eligibility for Title IV program participation and eligibility for tax-exempt status. These institutions should be treated as the greedy for-profit businesses that they are.

5) Education used to be thought of as an investment in the future. A generation of adults would tax themselves to provide free education for the next generation. The education-loan business reverses this view–let financially needy young people borrow from their own future incomes to be higher educated today. I hate education loans! My proposal to eliminate them would be to increase the Pell Grant maximum award to cost-of-attendance, and then expect states to match the federal effort to fund them. This Pell max should be set to some good quality higher education level, perhaps around $40,000. Colleges that had a higher cost of attendance (COA) would have to fund that from their own resources. My goal is to eliminate the damn loans for higher education, and fully meet demonstrated financial need for students from the bottom half of the family income distribution that are so poorly funded today. Also, I want to force states back into their historic roles funding higher education.

After a half century studying higher-education opportunity, my patience with the current dysfunctional and destructive system was exhausted long ago. Frankly, I am ashamed of the mess my generation has left for the next generation to live with. Again, I say I feel comfortable saying I told you this would happen, but it certainly did not have to happen if we had addressed the issues I tried to raise during my 50 year career.

Thomas G. Mortenson is a higher-education policy analyst, now living in Florida and Minnesota.

Sheridan Miller: Decline in number of new high-school graduates could hurt New England’s economy

At Providence’s prestigious (despite its ugly Brutalist architecture) Classical High School

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BOSTON

The number of new high-school graduates in New England is expected to shrink by nearly 13 percent by 2037, according to the 10th edition of Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates, released this week by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE).

Published by WICHE every four years, Knocking at the College Door is a widely recognized source of data and projections more than 15 years forward on the  high school graduate populations for all 50 states.

The latest edition includes projections of high-school graduates through the Class of 2037. The data include estimates for the U.S., regions, and the 50 states and Washington, D.C., for public and private high-school graduates, as well as a forecast of public high-school graduation rates by race/ethnicity.

Among key findings, NEBHE’s analysis of the report finds that, by 2037:

• The number of new high-school graduates in New England is expected to decline from 170,000 to 148,490, a 12.7 percent decrease.

• The number of public high-school graduates in the region is projected to fall by 11 percent, while the much smaller number of students graduating from New England’s private high schools will shrink by 23 percent.

• The region’s high schoolers will continue to become increasingly diverse. Over the next 16 years, the number of white high-school graduates will decline by 29 percent, while Black high-school graduates will increase by 7 percent, Hispanics by 54 percent, Asian and Pacific Islanders by 18 percent, and those who identify as two or more races by 42 percent.

New England’s challenges with an aging population and falling birth rates has been well chronicled. With these new projections and declining state revenues (to say nothing of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the report does not calculate), the number of public and private high schoolers expected to graduate in the region calls for a closer examination. High-school graduation rates are an especially important indicator of college matriculation and future success. We know that the more education that people have, the more likely they are to have a family-sustaining wage. If high-school graduation rates are declining in the region, this suggests that college graduation rates will do the same and have far-reaching effects on the success of individuals and our region’s economic competitiveness.

The projected overall decline in the number of New England’s high-school graduates will be largely driven by significant declines in Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, as each state is projected to see a decline of 18 percent. The initial decline in the region’s number of high-school graduates is expected to be modest, with much steeper drops projected to occur after 2025.

Projected regional graduation declines from 2019 suggest:

• From 2019 to 2020, the number of high-school graduates in the region fell by 0.3 percent.

• Between 2019 and 2025, this group is projected to shrink by 0.5 percent.

• Between 2019 and 2030, the number of high school graduates in New England is projected to drop by 8 percent.

• Between 2019 and 2037, the number of graduates is projected to drop by 12.7 percent.

With the number of high-school graduates expected to fall significantly across New England in the next decade and a half, legislators, educators and leaders in higher education must act proactively to make sure we can mitigate the impact of these declines in our region.

Public and private high schools

Overall, New England public and private high-school graduates constitute 4.5 percent of all high-school graduates in the U.S. New England has a higher percentage of private high school graduates than the rest of the nation. In fact, even though New England comprises a small proportion of the total U.S. population, the region’s private-school graduates made up 7 percent of all private-school graduates in the U.S. in 2020. New England public-school graduates made up only 4 percent of the nation’s total. By 2037, the region’s public high schools are projected to see an 11 percent decline in the number of graduates, and the data anticipate a larger decline of 23 percent among private high schools.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

As mentioned above, because New England’s high-school student population is predominantly white, much of the average decline that is projected to occur over the next 16 years can be explained by the decline of white student graduates and the region’s increasing diversification. Between 2020 and 2037, the number of New England’s white student high-school graduates is expected to decline by 29 percent. Nationally, the number of white graduates during this same period is expected to decline by 19 percent.

By comparison, the number of minoritized high school graduates in New England is expected to increase slightly across certain demographic groups, with the number of Black high school graduates rising by 7 percent over the next 16 years, the number of Hispanic graduates growing by 54 percent, Asian and Pacific Islander graduates growing by 18 percent, and graduates who identity as two or more races growing by 42 percent.

Additionally, the number of Alaska Native and American Indian high- school graduates in New England is expected to decline by 35 percent over the next 16 years. Though this group represents a small fraction of New England’s high-school student population, it is critical that education leaders and policymakers support these students.

As we continue to think about our roles in furthering equity, it is important to remember that our education system has historically been set up to cater to white students. As our student population becomes more diverse, we should focus on learning how best to support students of color while preparing educators in primary, secondary and higher education who also reflect the changing demographics of our students in the region.

Among the many significant implications of WICHE’s report for educators, legislators and higher education leaders, the projected decline in high-school graduates will have long-term effects on the rates of higher-education enrollment in New England and beyond. While this is bad news for the vast majority of the region’s postsecondary institutions that are enrollment-driven, the projected declines could also hurt our regional economy, as fewer individuals will be able to compete for good-paying jobs that require an education beyond high school and eventually fewer employers may be drawn to the region for its educated labor. Additionally, it is critical to consider the potential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic—both in the short- and long-terms—on high-school graduation rates and individuals’ decisions about whether to pursue higher education.

NEBHE will be answering questions about the implications of WICHE’s report in a Webinar in the New Year. More details to come soon.

Sheridan Miller is coordinator of state policy engagement at NEBHE. 

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Robin DeRosa: An urgent call for more equity in higher education

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

PLYMOUTH, N.H.

About a year ago, I attended a meeting at the New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE) focused on reducing the cost of learning materials for college students in our region. I have been pleased since then to work with colleagues across the New England states on NEBHE’s Open Education Advisory Committee that is looking into how best to support institutions and faculty as they replace high-cost commercial textbooks with free, openly licensed resources that can make college more accessible for learners and improve student engagement and success. This work is well underway, but the world seems vastly different than it did last year, and I have been thinking about how our current reality impacts and benefits from our ongoing work in open education.

When COVID-19 shut down the college campus where I work, faculty and staff knew that many of our students would be challenged by the quick transition to emergency remote learning. Learning online can feel alien to some students, and many of our faculty had only days to transition their courses into the new modality. What may have surprised many faculty, though, was the impact that COVID-19 had on our students’ basic needs and how that impact so thoroughly halted their ability to continue their learning.

While pre-COVID surveys tell us, for example, that almost half of American college students experienced food insecurity in the month prior to being surveyed, COVID thrust many of these students from chronic precarity to immediate emergency. As work-study jobs closed, and local businesses that employed students shut down, meager incomes shriveled and affording food, housing, car payments, internet and phone service and healthcare became impossible for many.

Faculty might have worried about how students would fare with complicated content delivered over Zoom, but students were worried that they would starve, become homeless or have to witness their families fall into even more dire poverty. Students became frontline workers, increasing hours at grocery stores and gas stations even though they couldn’t afford that time away from their studies, the personal protective equipment they needed to stay safe, nor the health-care costs they’d face if they got sick. As I worked with more and more students who were trying to survive through COVID, I wondered if “open education” was really enough of an answer to this scale of crisis.

On its surface, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police officers may seem to have little to do with COVID-19. But BLM and related movements to “defund the police” are deeply entwined with critiques that highlight how systemic racism pitches the playing field against Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC).

BLM doesn’t just call out specific cases of police brutality; it asks us to look at how policing, surveillance and the justice system ironically and brutally create unfair and unsafe living conditions for some Americans. “Defunding the police” isn’t just about taking military weapons and excess funding away from departments poisoned by bad apples; it’s about reinvesting in under-resourced neighborhoods and redistributing funding for social supports in underserved areas to create healthier communities from the inside out. It’s easy to see the effects that decades of redlining and a centuries-long history of American racism have had on our students. There are thousands of data points we could examine, but stick with with food insecurity for a moment (with more stats from a recent Hope Center report): the overall rate of food insecurity among students identifying as African-American or Black is 58%, which is 19 percentage points higher than the overall rate for students identifying as white or Caucasian. When COVID ravaged our precarious students, Black students were hit especially hard. Another demographic that deals most frequently with food insecurity is students who have formerly been convicted of a crime. Think about that today, more than three months after the murder of Breonna Taylor; only her boyfriend,who was defending his home against the surprise police invasion, has been arrested in that incident.

For some students (and even contingent faculty and staff in our universities) COVID has augmented inequities that were already baked into their lives. Our continuing institutional failures to ameliorate or address these inequities can no longer be tolerated, both because the vulnerable in our colleges are at a breaking point from a global pandemic and because we have been called out by a national social justice movement that is demanding that we make real change at last. Is open education a way to answer this call?

I want to cautiously explain why I think the answer is yes. The high cost of commercial textbooks has a much larger impact on student success than most people imagine, and the benefits of switching to OER are well-documented, especially for poor students and students of color. When we imagine the reasons for these improvements in “student success,” we generally chalk it up to cost savings; after all, students can’t learn from a book they can’t afford. I don’t mean to minimize the absolutely crucial impact of cost savings on learning, but what might be even more helpful about OER is the way it asks us to rethink the kind of architecture we want to shape our education system.

Many of us are familiar with the idea of the “College Earnings Premium,” which calculates that people with college degrees on average earn much more (recently estimated at 114% more) than those who don’t have degrees. Philip Trostel, a University of Maine economist who tracks the value of public higher education, takes the story of the earnings premium much further, explaining that many market benefits extend past individuals who go to college into the community at large (for example, if more people in a region go to college, tax revenues in the region also increase and the need for public assistance goes down). Even beyond this, public benefits extend past individuals and past economics, positively affecting health, disability rates, crime rates, longevity, marital stability, happiness and more. These benefits can be passed to children (whether or not they go to college) and in some cases even to whole regions. Similarly, as OER shows such benefit to individual students, we may overlook the more public benefits of making broader policy and practical changes that would expand OER (or college access) to all students.

I don’t just want to eliminate the profit motive in the “production” and “distribution” of learning and learning materials. I also want to embed learning in a structure that is fully aware of the social, public and communal value of higher education. When a global pandemic hits, I want colleges to open their gyms as overflow hospitals, work with local food pantries to ensure access to meals for everyone in the area and develop and openly share research to aid in finding treatments and cures. This is open education. When activists raise the alarm on systemic racism in policing, I want colleges to reject plagiarism software, disarm their campus police departments, increase the number of faculty of color in their ranks, and commit resources to antiracist research and initiatives. This is open education. When we work to shift from commercial textbooks to OER, we are not just saving students money; we are centering equity in education, and we shouldn’t undersell our vision. In fact, we shouldn’t sell this vision at all.

College is not only a way to make individual students richer. OER is not only a way to save individual students money. We have a chance to rebuild a post-COVID university that sees basic needs as integral to any learner’s academic success and actively develops ways to integrate basic needs with the missions of our institutions. We have a chance to redistribute our resources away from surveillant educational technology and corporations that mine student data for profit and think more about the value of education in terms of how healthy and safe and sustainable it can make the publics outside the walls of the academy. And how the academy can be more symbiotic with those publics.

When I work on OER initiatives, especially in larger collaborations across systems and states like our NEBHE team does, I am working on a vision for the future of higher education that is deeply responsive to the inequities that are threatening the heart of our country and threatening the lives of so many Americans who are fighting for survival at the very moment I am writing this. Our colleges and universities need to step up, and open education is a framework—perhaps one of many—that can help us center equity as we go forward at a pivotal moment in time.

Robin DeRosa is the director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, at the approach to the White Mountains. Check out the Museum of the White Mountains there. Hit this link:

https://www.plymouth.edu/mwm/

and:

http://digitalcollections.plymouth.edu/digital/collection/p15828coll7

Ellen Reed House, home of the English Department, at Plymouth State University

Walmart and ridgeline wind turbines in Plymouth

Photo by Atlawrence881

Class of 2020 should seek internships to reduce long-term economic ‘scarring’

BOSTON

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

2020 will forever be remembered as the year of COVID-19, the illness caused by a novel coronavirus. This year, the term “social distancing” became part of our vocabulary, and virtual proms and online commencement ceremonies became commonplace. According to Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of HIS Markit Forecast Summary of May 2020, on the economic front, 2020 is the year when the gross domestic product (GDP) is predicted to plunge and unemployment to rise to its highest level since the Great Depression.

Job postings as estimated by EMSI are down 32%, and more than 38 million Americans have filed for unemployment—so far, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. Every economic sector has been affected, although some have lost more jobs than others.

Notably, four sectors accounted for close to 70% of the jobs lost even though they account for just over half of the jobs in the economy. Leisure and hospitality, wholesale and retail trade, healthcare, and professional and business services make up 70% of job losses in April 2020, but those sectors had accounted for only 53% of jobs overall. Leisure and hospitality has been particularly hard hit, shouldering almost four times as many job losses compared to its size in the overall economy, according to Georgetown University analysis of government data.

Though leisure and hospitality is shouldering the heaviest burden of job losses, personal services (such as hair stylists, fitness trainers, and tour guides) also lost relatively higher fractions of jobs as well.

Although white-collar jobs in sectors such as professional and business services have been affected, the impact has been disproportionately higher in traditional blue-collar jobs—and according to some analysts, those jobs have been filled predominantly by women, in occupations such as waitresses, cashiers and sales. Lack of experience also make young workers more vulnerable any type of economic downturn and less likely to be employed in what little jobs remain.

The graduating class of 2020 will face a difficult job market, and the adversities will follow them for years. New graduates facing these types of jobs numbers will be subject to scarring—reduced lifetime incomes caused by entering the workforce during a downturn. Faced with the quandary of choosing between a subpar job or prolonged unemployment, new college grads should expect to earn up to 7% less for every 1% increase in the overall unemployment rate in the first few years.

The inertia of pay parity for the scarred class is likely to persist, with graduates still earning 2.5% lower than their peers who entered the workforce during rosier economic times, even 15 years later, according to past analysis by University of Rochester economist Lisa Kahn. Recent graduates fortunate enough to continue working in the internships they secured during the previous year will also see lower wages. The economic hardships faced by the graduating class of 2020 may even percolate down to the graduating class of 2021.

Georgetown University data analysis has shown that traditionally, recent graduates who could afford it weathered economic storms by going back to school and earning an additional credential, test-based license or certification. They figured extra credentials would give them a competitive edge when employers eventually resumed hiring.

COVID-19, however, has forced a reevaluation of that practice. The pandemic has caused chaos on college campuses, and many colleges have gone virtual, offering classes online, rather than in person. Good online connectivity has become necessary for matriculating, taking classes and graduating on time.

Previous researchers have shown as expected, the digital divide disproportionately affects low-income households. Geography also plays a role, with many areas receiving only spotty access to the Internet. Surprisingly, three times as many urban households lack access to broadband internet as rural households, according to recent data analysis on the topic. The seemingly simple solution of going to the local library for Internet access is not viable because of social distancing. Even with a strong Internet connection, however, the online format can be challenging and not necessarily compatible with nontraditional learning styles.

The experiences of the class of 2009, who graduated during the Great Recession—which, before COVID-19 was the worst recession since the Great Depression—are instructive. For them, internship opportunities were a big plus once the economy began recovering. Despite today’s challenges, upcoming graduates should consider taking similar opportunities to shore up their skills for what’s going to be an employer’s market for some time to come. If possible, they should consider holding off on taking jobs until good opportunities return.

Most economists, including a Georgetown analysis of HIS Markit predicts data, estimate a slow return over an 18-month to 36-month time frame. But like the pandemic itself, the timeline is unpredictable and shrouded in uncertainty. We do know, however, that jobs will return. The best bet for new graduates is to continue to prepare by accepting internships, adding credentials such as test-based industry certifications and utilizing informational interviews to tailor resumes, for when they arrive.

Nicole Smith is research professor and chief economist at the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

More Posts from this Series

COVID-19 and the Gap Year by Neeta P. Fogg and Paul E. Harrington

John O. Harney: 'Emergency remote'; a WPA for humanists?; defense workers kept on job

From The New England Journal of Higher Education (NEJHE), a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org):

A few items from the quarantine …

Wisdom from Zoom. COVID-19 has been a boon for Zoom and Slack (for people panicked by too many and too-slow emails). Last week, I zoomed into the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) Leadership Series conversation with Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) President Paul LeBlanc and HGSE Dean Bridget Long. LeBlanc notes that the online programs adopted by colleges and universities everywhere in the age of COVID-19 are very different from SNHU’s renowned online platform. Unlike SNHU, most institutions have launched “emergency remote” work to help students stay on track. Despite worries in some quarters about academic quality, LeBlanc says the quick transition online is not about relaxing standards, but ratcheting up care and compassion for suddenly dislocated students. The visionary president notes that just as telemedicine is boosting access to healthcare during the pandemic, online learning could boost access to education.

Among other observations, LeBlanc explains that “time” is the enemy for traditional students who have to pause classes when, for example, their child gets sick. If they are students in a well-designed online program, they can avoid delays in their education despite personal disruptions. He also believes students will want to come rushing back to campuses after COVID-19 dissipates, but with the recession, he wonders if they’ll be able to afford it. Oh and, by the way, LeBlanc ventures that it’s unlikely campuses will open in the fall without a lot more coronavirus testing.

Summer learning loss becomes COVID learning loss. That’s the concern of people like Chris Minnich, CEO of the nonprofit assessment and research organization NWEA, founded in Oregon as the Northwest Evaluation Association. The group predicts that when students finally head back to school next fall (presumably), they are likely to retain about 70% of this year’s gains in reading, compared with a typical school year, and less than 50% in math. The concern over achievement milestones reminds me of the fretting over SATs and ACTs as well as high-stakes high school tests, being postponed. Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, notes that the pause “provides all of us with an opportunity to rethink the testing requirements.”

Another WPA for Humanists? Modern Language Association Executive Director Paula M. Krebs recently reminded readers that during the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration, though commonly associated with building roads and bridges, also employed writers, researchers, historians, artists, musicians, actors and other cultural figures. Given COVID-19, “this moment calls for a new WPA that employs those with humanities expertise in partnership with scientists, health-care practitioners, social scientists, and business, to help shape the public understanding of the changes our collective culture is undergoing,” writes Krebs.

Research could help right now. News of the University of New Hampshire garnering $6 million from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to build and test an instrument to monitor space weather reminded me of when research prowess was recognized as a salient feature of New England’s higher education leadership. That was mostly before jabs like the “wastebook” from then-U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) ridiculed any spending on research that didn’t translate directly to commercial use. But R&D work can go from suspect to practical very quickly. For example, consider research at the University of Maine’s Lobster Institute trying to see if an extract from lobsters might work to treat COVID-19. Or consider that 15 years ago, the Summer 2004 edition of Connection (now NEJHE) ran a short piece on an unpopular research lab being built by Boston University and the federal government in Boston’s densely settled South End to study dangerous germs like Ebola. The region was also a pioneer in community relations, and the neighborhood was tense about the dangers in its midst to say the least. But today, that lab’s role in the search for a coronavirus vaccine is much less controversial.

Advice for grads in a difficult year. This journal is inviting economists and other experts on “employability”  to weigh in on how COVID-19 will affect 2020’s college grads in New England. What does it mean for the college-educated labor market that has been another New England economic advantage historically?

Bath Iron Works will keep its employees at work.

Defense rests? One New England industry that is not shutting down due to COVID-19 is the defense industry. In Maine, General Dynamics Bath Iron Works ordered face masks for employees and expanded its sick time policy, but union leaders say the company isn’t doing enough to address coronavirus. More than 70 Maine lawmakers recently asked the company to consider closing temporarily to protect workers from the spread of the virus. But the Defense Department would have to instruct the shipyard to close, and Pentagon officials say it is a “Critical Infrastructure Industry.” About 17,000 people who work at the General Dynamics Electric Boat’s shipyards in Quonset Point, R.I., and Groton, Conn., are in the same boat, so to speak. They too have been told to keep reporting to work. In New London, a letter in The Day pleaded with Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont to shut down Electric Boat. Critical Infrastructure Industry. If only attack subs on schedule could help beat an “invisible enemy.”

John O. Harney is executive editor of The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Below, “Wong’s Pot with Old Flowers,” by Montserrat College Prof. Timothy Harney.

Lindsey Gumb: Pandemic means now is the time to widen access to learning materials

Open Access logo, originally designed by Public Library of Science

From The New England Journal of Higher Education, a service of The New England Board of Higher Education (nebhe.org)

BRISTOL, R.I.

Residential college and university campuses across New England abruptly closed their doors last month during the COVID-19 outbreak, and while some schools were in session and students were asked to vacate, many others were on spring break and students were asked not to return. In both situations, students found themselves at home or in new environments where they waited to see how their education would progress online and remotely.

Among many variables associated with the chaos and stress of the pandemic, a lack of direct access to learning materials like textbooks has arisen as one of the major roadblocks to student learning in the era of COVID-19.

As a nation, we have continued to observe a sharp rise in textbook prices since 1977, which leaves many students enrolled at postsecondary institutions, public or independent, unable to afford the required learning materials for their courses. As a Band-Aid solution, students often rely on borrowing a copy of the book or material from a classmate or the campus library—options that became obsolete overnight when campuses closed and we entered this new world of social distancing and online learning and course delivery. When access barriers to learning materials like textbooks exist, either financial or circumstantial (as in the case of COVID-19), we know that students’ grades and academic trajectory suffer, and ultimately institutional retention can take a hit. Having been laid off from part-time jobs, denied unemployment and mostly left out of the COVID-19 stimulus package, college students have enough stress and anxiety right now—the last thing they should be worrying about is not having access to their textbooks. Enter OER (Open Educational Resources).

Are those “solutions” really OER?

Textbook prices are only part of the access barrier issue. As teaching and learning shifts fully online during the COVID-19 pandemic, educators have been forced to more closely consider and analyze how copyright restrictions set by publishers may limit their students’ access to these essential learning materials. The last few weeks have shown more than ever why true OER have significant value in ensuring students have access to their learning materials, because they are free and have licenses that allow for reuse and retention without limitation. This is not the case with publisher content like textbooks or the many online learning “solutions” they offer in which access is only semester-long, not in perpetuity like OER. These materials, even if offered free of charge by the publisher right now during the pandemic, will inevitably shuffle back behind a paywall at the end of the semester, disproportionately harming students affected by conditions out of their control brought on by COVID-19 (displacement, illness, caretaking responsibilities, etc.) and who may need to retake courses and need access to the materials again.

OER providers such as Lumen Learning, Saylor Academy and the Open Course Library have full online courses ready to be adopted and easily integrated into learning management systems with very little effort needed by faculty members. The content is customizable. Students have immediate, free access, and unlike publisher content, access to the content won’t be lost when the semester ends.

OER, however, is not and cannot be the blanket solution for ensuring students have access to their learning materials during a time like this. In fact, we’ve heard stories from across the region of institutions handing out technology and hotspots to help address the digital inequities that exist for so many students. The Community College of Rhode Island awarded nearly 700 students grants to acquire computers or gain internet access with an additional 61 iPads distributed to students who requested them. OER are primarily digital resources, and students need an Internet connection to at least initially download the resource onto a device. While they are free, OER will still require other institutional support systems to make sure our students have everything they need to equitably participate in their remote learning.

Freeing information

This isn’t just about students’ access to textbooks. Also at issue is the current publishing industry’s suppression of access to information. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Research Coalition) defines Open Access (OA) as the “free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. OA ensures that anyone can access and use these results—to turn ideas into industries and breakthroughs into better lives.” The American Library Association and academic librarians have long been advocating for OA policies that remove barriers to scholarly, peer-reviewed research that are typically only accessible to those who have an active academic affiliation such as faculty, students, staff at colleges and universities. Institutions pay outrageous annual subscription fees on behalf of their community members to access this content, and those who have no affiliation pay a fee to access each article.

We’ve seen recently that many news organizations, such as The New York Times, Bloomberg News and The Atlantic, have removed the paywall on articles pertaining to COVID-19 so that the public has access to pertinent information that could potentially be lifesaving. OA fosters the same spirit except, instead of news, the information is peer-reviewed research, often generated by researchers through federal grant funding, aka “your tax dollars.” New research, particularly in the medical field, can have an immediate impact on public health. If that information is behind a paywall, only the privileged will have access to that potentially life-saving research. In January, a Washington Post article, Scientists are unraveling the Chinese coronavirus with unprecedented speed and openness, strongly illustrated this point. The genome sequence of the coronavirus was posted in an open access repository for genetic information and literally overnight, Andrew Mesecar, a professor of cancer structural biology at Purdue University, got a hold of it and started analyzing the DNA sequence. The immediate domino effect of having this information freely available has led to an international collaboration of scientists working together to aid in this public health crisis. Victoria Heath and Brigitte Vézina’s recent blog post for Creative Commons, Now is the time for Open Access Policies—here’s why, reminds us that “we must cooperate effectively to respond to an unprecedented global health emergency. The mantra “when we share, everyone wins” applies now more than ever.”

Robin DeRosa, director of the Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth (N.H.) State University, notes “there is a link between public health and Open. The open sharing of research and data can help us quickly collaborate to find medical solutions. Open pedagogy can help us involve our students in our fields’ responses to the pandemic and remind us that the digital divide can complicate remote learning. And OER can remove barriers for students and faculty who need to shift to more ubiquitously available resources. Open is about public infrastructure more than it is a set of free textbooks.”

For more on the basics and supporting research of OER, check out Open Matters: A Brief Intro and see additional resources at the Open Education and Open Educational Resources page on NEBHE’s website.

Lindsey Gumb is an assistant professor and the scholarly communications librarian at Roger Williams University, in Bristol, where she has been leading OER adoption, revision and creation since 2016, focusing heavily on OER-enabled pedagogy collaborations with faculty. She co-chairs the Rhode Island Open Textbook Initiative Steering Committee and the is Fellow for Open Education at the New England Board of Higher Education. She was awarded a 2019-20 OER Research Fellowship to conduct research on undergraduate student awareness of copyright and fair use and open licensing as it pertains to their participation in OER-enabled pedagogy projects.

(Editor’s note: New England Diary’s editor, Robert Whitcomb, is a former member of The New England Board of Higher Education’s Editorial Advisory Board.)

Clock tower at Roger Williams University, in Mount Hope Bay

— Phtoto by Notyourbroom