Brigid Harrington: As high court decision looms, colleges search for alternatives to affirmative action

At Harvard’s campus, in Cambridge, Mass., the university’s seal.

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

The U.S. Supreme Court may ban race-based affirmative action for college admissions this year. But that does not mean that schools will abandon their diversity goals.

As administrators wait for the high court to issue its final decision in two key affirmative-action cases, they are figuring out how they can continue to create the heterogenous campuses they want.

It is not an easy task. In an effort to increase racial diversity on campus, many colleges already have experimented with changing early action and legacy rules to no avail. “There is no replacement for being able to consider race,” Olufemi Ogundele, the University of California at Berkeley’s dean of admissions, recently told The Washington Post. “It just does not exist.”

Still, schools are searching for viable alternatives. The justices signaled during oral arguments last fall that they were ready to overturn their 19-year-old ruling that allowed race to be a factor in admissions decisions. Even back in 2003, the court maintained that race was not the ideal way to achieve diversity, saying racial preferences would no longer be necessary within 25 years.

In the two cases currently before the court, Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard University as well as the University of North Carolina (UNC), arguing that it was unconstitutional to use race as part of the holistic admissions process. The court is expected to issue its ruling in June.

Judicial scholars expect that the court will make no distinction between public and private universities, banning affirmative action for nearly every school. Groups that filed amicus briefs in the current cases argued for two exceptions: for certain faith-basedschools, which say their mission is to help the historically disadvantaged, and for military academies, which contend that diversity in the officer corps is critical for military cohesion. It remains to be seen how, or if, the court will consider such exceptions.

The vast majority of colleges include diversity as part of their mission statements. But they will now need to engage in some deep soul-searching to decide what diversity really means to them. Do they want only students of different races on campus or do they really seek diversity of student viewpoints and life experiences?

To be sure, race – especially in America – influences a person’s life experience, and most colleges would agree that having students interact with classmates from other races in itself is valuable. But there are many other types of diversity, too, and schools may want to balance them all, including cultural, religious, geographic and socio-economic diversity.

Colleges that do not engage in race-based affirmative actions have tried a variety of approaches to achieve diversity based on socioeconomic and other factors. Texas launched an innovative model more than 20 years ago, later adopted by Florida and California schools, that guarantees students admission to its flagship public universities if they graduated in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. This “top 10 percent plan” quickly became controversial and has had mixed results. It boosted Hispanic enrollment at leading public universities, but not Black enrollment, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune. The law had minimal effects on application rates from low-income high schools, other analyses found.

Another potential approach: ending early admission. These programs are used mostly by affluent students with access to savvy college counseling, who know it’s far easier to get into top-rated schools by applying early. But ending the practice may not make much difference unless a lot of schools agreed to simultaneously make such a change. Harvard University ended early admissions in 2007 for five years, urging other Ivy League schools to join them. But when no other colleges halted their programs, Harvard’s ability to attract historically disadvantaged students plummeted. Top minority students simply chose other Ivy League colleges. After five years, Harvard restarted its early-action program.

In their search for alternatives to race-based affirmative action, some colleges may consider eliminating legacy preference programs. Since the vast majority of legacies are Caucasian, some education experts view this practice as unfair and arcane. Top British universities, such as Oxford and Cambridge, ended legacy admissions long ago in the name of equity, but American university administrators have argued that the number of legacies is so small that it wouldn’t affect diversity much.

Colleges that have ended legacy admissions report vastly different experiences. The University of California schools did not improve their diversity by banning legacy admissions. But Johns Hopkins University, which stopped legacy preferences in 2014, has seen a substantial increase in minority enrollment in recent years. The number of undergraduate minorities jumped by more than 10 percentage points between 2009 and 2020, and now more than one-fourth of the university’s undergraduates are minorities.

There’s one key difference between Hopkins and the University of California schools: affirmative action. Unlike the University of California, Hopkins still considers race as a factor in admissions. If the Supreme Court rules that all colleges – including Hopkins – must be race-blind, it’s not clear whether banning legacy admissions would make much difference.

Some colleges are thinking about focusing on socio-economic diversity rather than race, which could wind up increasing the number of historically-disadvantaged minorities since many such students are low-income. But that could prove tricky, too. Outside of the rarefied world of Harvard and UNC, there are limits to how many students from low-income backgrounds some colleges can admit because of financial constraints. Many simply do not have enough scholarship money to offer to these applicants.

In a race-blind admissions world, colleges may need to resort to asking its applicants for help. If they require a new essay, asking students how they could contribute to diversity on campus, they may discover all kinds of new ways to create the educational melting pot they really want. It may be schools’ best hope.

Brigid Harrington is a lawyer at Bowditch & Dewey LLP a Massachusetts firm. Her practice focuses on issues facing institutions of higher education. Email: bharrington@bowditch.com.

Ginette Saimprevil: The long road to education equality in Boston

At 46 Joy St., Boston, the Abiel Smith School,  was founded in 1835 and is the oldest public school in the U.S. built for the sole purpose of educating African-American children. It houses the Museum of African American History.

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

Boston has had an extraordinarily long and tumultuous history as a fulcrum of the fight for the equal education of Black people.

Black Bostonians began petitioning the Massachusetts legislature for greater access to the public school system in 1787. In 1835, the Abiel Smith School opened—the first building erected for the sole purpose of housing a Black public school. However, conditions in this underfunded, segregated school were below standard, and the Black community continued to campaign for equal-education opportunities. While public school segregation was officially outlawed in 1855, de facto segregation continued to be the reality in Boston.

In 1965, the legislature passed the Racial Imbalance Act, which outlawed segregation in public schools and, most significantly, defined segregated schools as those with a student body comprised of more than 50 percent of a particular racial group. Yet despite this ruling, Boston School Committee members refused to implement plans to integrate the city’s schools, and the relentless struggle for equal education continued.

In 1974, a federal court-ordered busing plan to end school segregation in Boston resulted in an eruption of protests and violence in the streets, as well as death threats against the judge in the case. Even innocent children being bussed were attacked. Despite the continuation of busing for more than a decade, white flight and a later decision to allow children in residentially segregated areas to attend neighborhood schools resulted in resegregation of many of Boston’s schools. By the 2017-18 school year, more than half of Boston Public Schools were profoundly segregated—even more than in 1965, according to a 2018 report by The Boston Globe. This situation persists to this day.

Boston’s segregated schools, with largely Black and Latinx students, tend to have a higher student-to-teacher ratio as well as older textbooks, lower quality facilities, fewer school counselors per student and other inequalities. This inevitably means that these students will face greater difficulties when it comes to gaining admission to college, completing their degrees and embarking on careers.

Secret sauce

At Bottom Line (BL), we seek to level the playing field by providing students with ongoing in-person advising from their senior year in high school through college graduation. Our trained, professional advisers deliver intensive, relationship-based, one-on-one advising, and they partner with students to select and gain admission to a college that is the best possible fit—academically, financially and culturally.

Our access advisers support high school seniors, based on their individual needs, in navigating the college application process using our LEAAD curriculum:

• List: generating a list of colleges suited to students’ academic and financial situations.

• Essay: brainstorm, writing and editing essays.

• Applications: completing college applications.

• Affordability: securing financial aid.

• Decision: making a college choice.

Advisers and students review students’ options to select a college that best meets academic, financial and personal needs, with students receiving transition-to-college programming over the summer before their first college year.

The “secret sauce” in the Bottom Line approach is the holistic support—considering the whole student and building authentic relationships through our hybrid model. Our advisers conduct some in person meetings and provide remote support via video, phone and text communication.

In the college-access program, students meet with their advisers about 10 times a year. In the success program in college, students are paired with a success adviser who works with them one on one. Advisers offer regular support in the four areas most likely to cause a student to drop out of college: Degree, Employability, Affordability and Life, or DEAL.

This comprehensive support is provided for up to six years or until a student graduates. Our career-connections team and advisors provide coaching and support to help students/recent graduates build their social and career capital to launch mobilizing careers. Support includes mock interviewing, resume-writing workshops, help securing job shadows and internships, and networking events to prepare students for the workforce.

This work has a significant impact on our students and communities we serve. On average, our students earn nearly double their family income in their first job out of college. Our individualized college access, success and career connections support to students also results in a historic six-year graduation rate of 76 percent (more than double the national average).

Bottom Line’s model is recognized for its rigorous, externally validated proof-of-impact on college enrollment, persistence and graduation. An independent research report on “The Bottom Line on College Advising: Large Increases in Degree Attainment” confirms the impact of current BL programs and the notable potential for expansion. Researchers found that compared to the controlled group, Bottom Line students are 23 percent more likely to graduate from college. The researchers also added, “While the observed degree effects are quite consistent across different types of students, the fact that BL primarily serves students of color furthermore suggests that substantial expansion of the BL model could contribute to increased racial equity and mobility in the U.S.”

The estimated impact of advising on bachelor’s degree attainment is roughly as large as the (conditional on aptitude) gap in degree attainment between children from families in the first and fourth quartile of the income distribution.

I know from my personal as well as professional experience that the Bottom Line model works. My family emigrated from Haiti when I was 10. While my parents instilled in me a tradition of diligence and perseverance, they had no experience with higher education and were unable to help me navigate college-admissions and financial-aid processes. Fortunately, I was introduced to the BL program when I was a high school junior, and my adviser helped me find my way to a full tuition scholarship at Bowdoin College and a fulfilling career helping other students succeed.

Recently, our organization received a $15 million grant from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott. This grant will let us accelerate implementation of our strategic plan. This plan partly includes strategies to increase the number of students in Boston, New York City and Chicago, because we know there is a need for educational equity across the nation. The goal is to directly serve 20,000 students as well as reach 400,000 indirectly.

The Abiel Smith School,  the oldest public school in the U.S. built for the sole purpose of educating African American children, now houses the exhibition galleries of the Museum of African American History. The very walls of this historic  building are dedicated to telling the story of the Boston abolitionist movement and equal education. It is an inspiring place to reflect on the  role of education at the core of equality and the continuum of persistence and progress in Boston’s Black community. It is a centuries old story that we hope to play a role in by ensuring that more students of color attain their college degrees.

Ginette Saimprevil is executive director of Bottom Line Massachusetts.

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.

Adam Bush: In Providence, rethinking higher education for older students

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

We all received the “good” news recently that students are gradually returning to college, slowing the loss of 1 million students in post-secondary classrooms over the past two years to a trickle. But just as COVID-19 has exposed many of the cracks in our social framework, so, too, has it laid bare what an outspoken few have known for years: Higher education isn’t working. Or, to speak more plainly, it is working—to maintain the perception of “meritocracy” that cements hierarchies based on race and inherited wealth.

Meanwhile, in just two years, the number of adults with some college but no degree has spiked by 9 percent, growing to 39 million.

The problem should not be framed, “How can we bring these folks back to college?” but instead, “How can we transform higher education to meet their needs—and what might that transformation mean for all learners seeking a college degree?”

College Unbound (CU), based in Providence, is designed for adults looking to advance in their current careers, move into new vocations or spark change that improves the quality of life for themselves and others. In 2020, we were accredited by the New England Commission of Higher Education. During the pandemic, CU more than doubled our enrollment, and became one of two designated Hispanic Serving Institutions in Rhode Island. Our retention rate for fall 2021 students was 90 percent.

Over the past 13 years, we have designed a college from the ground up, informed by the experiences of our adult learners. Students came to us, and were recruited by us, from moments of frustration in their lives—of being kept from promotions, of financial hurt from accumulating debt and from being misunderstood as lacking agency, intellect and leadership capacity because they did not possess a bachelor’s degree. Students also came to us with a wealth of professional and personal experience and a wealth of learning from both their failures and successes.

While the average age of CU students is 36, we believe that colleges serving students of all ages should think about everyone returning to the classroom as adult learners. And instead of just adding academic, financial and social support, we urge colleges to rethink how they see their learners. Here are a few ways to do so:

Honor your students’ interests.

College Unbound’s curriculum, a single major in Organizational Leadership and Change, is built around student projects that connect to professional development and personal growth. Students meet weekly in professional or place-based cohorts to advance their scholarship, building community, engagement and momentum for learning. In a 2021 survey of our alumni that received a 100 percent response rate, 87 percent report thast they have continued to work on their project after graduation. Notably, 81 percent of CU alumni reported that the project has had a demonstrable impact in their lives, workplaces, organizations, communities or for others beyond CU.

Credit their skills.

Students in their first semester are required to take a course called “Learning from Experience,’’ which introduces them to what we call The Big 10: leadership and change competencies that provide a foundation for CU’s single major of Organizational Leadership and Change. These competencies, which include Problem Solving, Intercultural Engagement, and Communication, align closely with the skills that employers value most. The Big 10 also form CU’s process for obtaining credit for prior learning (CPL). This process is detailed on our website at Building Your Big 10 Leadership & Change Portfolio. While many colleges offer CPL, only 11 percent of adult students earn credit for prior learning. We are unique in that 100 percent of our students complete at least 10 credits via prior learning, because the Big 10 are graduation requirements. By requiring Learning from Experience in the first year, CU graduates earn an average of 21 CPL credits, accelerating their time to completion by more than three semesters.

Meet students where they are already learning.

CU is exploring ways in which college can be accessed through trusted providers of lifelong learning. In partnership with Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), CU offers free learning circles with an option for college credit, initially at the Providence Public Library and Providence Community Library. Participants who attend learning circles work and learn together at their local community library in a “study group” atmosphere, led by a facilitator. Course materials come from online course providers, universities, and nonprofit organizations from around the world—meaning the courses are both free to take and facilitate.

P2PU and CU now offer these learning circles nationwide through open trainings that will reach an additional 100+ library staff across the country. This project seeks to transform the learning that happens in libraries into a viable degree-completion pathway for radically increasing earnings, uplifting families and transforming communities. Locally, we plan to launch a cohort of BA completers at the Providence Community Library next spring. Long term, we hope this initiative can lead to a global infrastructure that enables public library staff to serve their patrons close to home by offering high-quality credit-bearing training and microcredentialing at low cost in in-demand topics.

The 39 million adults with some college, but no degree, deserve better opportunities than what our current system has to offer. It has been clear for far too long that higher education needs a radical shift in its approach to truly create the “student-centered” learning environment that so many institutions hope to foster. We must meet our students where they are, recognizing that at any age, they will bring an array of interests and prior learning—which should be lifted up, appreciated and credited. We at College Unbound will continue to push for these changes in these critical next few years.

The COVID pandemic has exposed and widened many of the cracks that have existed in higher education since its inception. But this time of recovery also represents an opportunity for all of us to rethink how we might seal up many of those cracks at their very foundation.

Adam Bush is provost and co-founder of College Unbound.

John O. Harney: All you can eat — interesting data From New England and beyond

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

BOSTON

The ranks of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine as the least diverse states in America, based on measures of socioeconomic, cultural, economic, household, religious and political diversity: 47th, 48th, 49th WalletHub

Ranks of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, Maine and New Hampshire among the most expensive U.S. states to retire in: 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 10th, 14th Bankrate

Increase in lifetime earning associated with lifetime labor union membership: $1,300,000 Parolin, Z., & VanHeuvelen, T., The Cumulative Advantage of a Unionized Career for Lifetime Earnings, ILR Review

Support for labor unions among Gen Zers (defined as being 23 years old or younger in 2020): 64% Center for American Progress

World rank of California’s economy if it were a country: 5th (soon to be 4th) Bloomberg News

Percentage of Americans who rely on autocorrect to correct misspellings: 79% Unscrambled Words

Percentage who say they judge someone who often misspells: 61% Unscrambled Words

Share of New Bedford (Mass.) High School students who were “chronically absent” in 2022, meaning they missed at least 18 days, or 10% of school: 70% The New Bedford Light on NAEP Data

Number of reports of book bans received by the nonprofit PEN America during a nine-month period from July 2021 through March 2022: 1,586 PEN America (PEN American reports 671 additional book bans during that period have come to light. A further 275 more bans followed from April through June, bringing the total for the 2021-22 school year to 2,532 bans.)

Percentage of those banned books that had a protagonist or main character of color: 41% PEN America

Percentage of those banned books that had LGBTQ themes: 33% PEN America

Number of America’s approximately 90,000 school board members who are known to be LGBTQ: 90 Victory Institute

Number of additional LGBTQ school board members who would have to be elected to match the 7% of the adult U.S. population that identifies as LGBTQ: 6,300 Victory Institute

At Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Mass.

From 2010 to 2015, Harvard University’s admission rate for “legacy” applicants with at least one Harvard-educated parent: 34%  Jennifer Lee, sociology professor at Columbia University, op-ed in Los Angeles Times

Admission rate for “non-legacy” applicants who do not have a Harvard-educated parent: 6% Jennifer Lee, sociology professor at Columbia University, op-ed in Los Angeles Times

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

Painting of “Still Life with Kitaj’s Death mask,” by Montserrat College of Art (Beverly, Mass.) professor Timothy Harney.

Viktoria Popovska: For New England higher education, cybersecurity signals news threats and opportunities

— Graphic by Michel Bakni

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

BOSTON

Some of the most common cybersecurity threats are malware, ransomware, phishing and spam. For their victims, including higher education institutions (HEIs), cybercrimes range from inconveniences to data breaches to grand heists like the one that struck Cape Cod Community College (CCCC) four years ago.

In 2018, CCCC, in West Barnstable, experienced a cybersecurity attack resulting in $800,000 stolen from school bank accounts. CCCC was ultimately able to recover more than 80% of the money stolen by the hackers, but impacts of the attack still affect the college.

The cyberattack prompted CCCC, known as the 4Cs, to work with an independent consulting firm to learn best practices related to the institution’s cybersafety. These included, for example, installing endpoint protection software applications that protect servers and PCs from malware campuswide.

President John Cox of Cape Cod Community College spoke about the school’s cyberattack and what he has learned from the situation.

“One of the major takeaways from that is when you are looking at a website or anything electronic and you are being asked to open something up or go to a certain website or scan a QR code, unless you are 99% sure that it’s the real deal, then you shouldn’t hesitate to call the people who sent it to verify it.”

The CCCC attack also prompted the community college to reevaluate its degree programs. In the 2020-21 academic year, CCCC began offering a degree and certification in Information Technology: Cybersecurity. Previously, this pathway had been Information Technology: Security Penetration Testing and though the course requirements haven’t changed much, the new name and reframing of the program is a sign that the 4Cs and other HEIs are realizing the importance of offering cybersecurity programs, and prospective students are taking notice.

Will Markow, the vice president of applied research at LightCast, estimated that his labor market analytics company has seen at least a 40% increase in cybersecurity graduates in the last few years. Despite the rise in people completing cybersecurity degrees, the growth rate of cybersecurity job positions is still double the graduation rate, meaning a cybersecurity skills gap continues to persist.

NEBHE and cybersecurity

NEBHE, with its longtime interest in changing skilled labor demands, has been covering the need for cybersecurity talent for several years. In a 2014 piece in The New England Journal of Higher Education, Yves Salomon-Fernandez, then a vice president at MassBay Community College, wrote about the cybergap and the demand for cybersecurity talent along with New England’s response to the need. Salomon-Fernandez discussed the creation of the New England Cyber Security research consortium, a collaboration between Mass Insight and the Advanced Cyber Security Center. The consortium has evolved into the Cybersecurity Education and Training Consortium, which aims to improve the cybersecurity talent pool. The consortium holds an annual conference where new research is shared and cybersecurity experts lead various workshops.

In 2015, NEBHE announced that cybersecurity was among new academic subject areas to be offered under Tuition Break, NEBHE’s initiative to help students and institutions share high-demand programs. These offerings included associate degree programs in specialized fields such as cybersecurity infrastructure, cybersecurity and healthcare IT, and cybersecurity-digital forensics.

In July 2022, NEBHE, in collaboration with the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF), awarded tech talent grants to seven business-higher education partnerships in Connecticut. The grants are a part of an initiative to target growth in tech skills like cybersecurity. Quinnipiac University, the University of Bridgeport and Mitchell college were awarded tech talent grants focused on cybersecurity.

The skills gap

The cybersecurity skills shortage continues to persist and organizations of all types face cybersecurity challenges.

In its 2022 Cybersecurity Skills Gap Global Research Report, Fortinet found that “worldwide, 80% of organizations suffered one or more breaches that they could attribute to a lack of cybersecurity skills and/or awareness.”

The Fortinet report also found that recruiting and retaining cybersecurity talent was a key issue. 60% of organizations have difficulty recruiting cybersecurity professionals and 52% have a difficult time retaining those professionals.

In 2018, The New York Times reported on a prediction from CyberSecurity Ventures that estimated 3.5 million cybersecurity positions will be available but unfulfilled by 2021. CyberSecurity Ventures has since updated its prediction for 2025, but continues to project vacancies at 3.5 million. “Despite industry-wide efforts to reduce the skills gap, the world’s open cybersecurity position in 2021 is enough to fill 50 NFL stadiums,” according to CyberSecurity Ventures.

Clearly, there is a need for more cybersecurity professionals, but why have efforts to reduce the skills gap not worked?

One reason is that people simply aren’t getting the right credentials to secure a cybersecurity position. Many top cybersecurity jobs require not just a bachelor’s degree, but also a master’s and may also require credentials such as a CISSP certification. CISSP stands for Certified Information Systems Security Professional and is independently granted by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium.

Despite the demand for cybersecurity positions to be filled, the industry is slow to soften the credentials or education requirements. But some companies, such as Deloitte, have begun creating a talent pipeline where they train candidates in skills they would not have previously been qualified for.

Cybersecurity and higher education

Cape Cod Community College is far from alone in facing cybersecurity threats.

The threat that cyberattacks pose for HEIs is extremely costly and increasingly frequent, according to April 2022 coverage in Forbes. Ransomware attacks are the most frequent problem for HEIs, with each attack costing on average $112,000 in ransom payments. Forbes writes that HEIs are prime targets for cyberattacks because of their historically underfunded cybersecurity efforts and the way that information sharing and computer systems work in the institutions.

Austin Berglas, global head of professional services and founding member of the cybersecurity firm BlueVoyant, told Forbes that his company had seen a large increase in ransomware attacks in 2020 and 2021 since everyone went remote.

In 2022, a handful of U.S. HEIs have publicly disclosed cyberattacks, according to Hackmageddon, a security breach tracker. Still, most cyberattacks on institutions go unreported unless forced to by law.

Universities have begun upgrading their cyberdefense systems, partially as a result of nudging from the insurance industry.

With the understanding of the threat of cyberattacks, HEIs are working on pumping out cybersecurity professionals.

Consider the University of Bridgeport (Conn.), one of the universities that received a tech talent grant from NEBHE and BHEF. The university announced that it will use the grant money to launch a 12-week course in cybersecurity and information security geared toward the finance and tech sectors. The university plans to offer a certificate to course participants that will allow students to be workforce ready in the cybersecurity field.

Other New England HEIs are also looking to impact the cybersecurity world. Yale University is partnering with other institutions to support the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace Program, a research program supported by the National Science Foundation. That program is working on initiatives like the creation of a confidential computing center, making a secure software supply chain and working to improve computing in marginalized communities.

In addition to the programs offered through NEBHE’s Tuition Break, five Massachusetts universities offer bachelor’s degrees in a cybersecurity-related field as well as two in Connecticut, two in Vermont, three in Maine, three in Rhode Island and one in New Hampshire, according to Cybersecurity Guide. Various other associate, master’s and doctoral degrees in cybersecurity fields are also available at New England HEIs.

Cox, of CCCC, also spoke about the school’s partnership with Bridgewater State University, which is developing a cyber range to simulate and test cybersecurity networks. This cyber range will allow students and professionals to perform mock cybercrime investigations to better prepare for any situation.

This is unlikely the last you’ll read on the complex challenges of cybersecurity in The New England Journal of Higher Education.

Viktoria Popovska is a NEBHE journalism intern and a junior at Boston University.

John O. Harney: Marketing abortion ruling; armed youth; ‘don’t say gay’ in Greenwich; not the ‘Flutie Effect’

Map by Tpwissaa

Greenwich, Conn., High School

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

BOSTON

Could the anti-choice, forced-birth culture of the U.S. Supreme Court and many U.S. states present an advantage for New England economic boosters?

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker told reporters that he had heard from a lot of companies that the recent Supreme Court decision removing the federal protection of the right to abortion may offer a big opportunity for Massachusetts to attract some employers whose employees would want access to reproductive-health services. Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont called on businesses in states that limit abortion access to consider relocating to Connecticut.

In the context of choosing where to start or expand a business, big employers have occasionally written off New England as “old and cold” compared with economically and meteorologically sunnier spots. However, a 1999 poll by the University of Connecticut’s Center for Survey Research and Analysis, while admittedly dated, found an interesting niche for New England. International site-selection consultants, accustomed to Europe’s pricey, regulated environments, were less concerned with New England’s notoriously high costs than domestic site-selection pros. Key issues for the international consultants were access to higher education, an educated workforce and good infrastructure. 

Peter Denious, chief executive of Advance CT, a business-development organization, recently told the Connecticut Mirror that such issues as diversity, equity and inclusion—and the state’s commitment to clean energy—could all help Connecticut align with the corporate goals of certain companies.

Our culture of active government, unionization and especially our human- resource development, could bode well once again in relatively enlightened New England.

Anti-semitism rising: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported 2,717 anti-semitic incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2021 in the U.S., the highest number since the ADL began tracking anti-semitic incidents in 1979, according to the group’s annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents. These included more than 180 anti-semitic incidents in New England. And nationally, 155 anti-semitic incidents were reported at more than 100 college campuses. Meanwhile, tension between anti-semitism and anti-zionism, including the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, is challenging on campuses and beyond

Packing heat. More than 1 million U.S. adolescents (ages 12 to 17) said they had carried a handgun in 2019-20, up 41% from about 865,000 in 2002-03, according to a study by researchers at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, using data from the National Survey on Drug Use & Health. The socio-demographic profile of the gun carriers also changed. Carrying rates grew from 3.1% to 5.3% among white adolescents, from 2.6% to 5.1% among higher-income adolescents, and from 4.3% to 6.9% among rural adolescents between, while rates among Black, American Indian/Alaskan Native and lower-income adolescents decreased.

“Don’t Say Gay” here? In April, Mount Holyoke College President Sonya Stephens wrote here that Florida legislation dubbed by opponents the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, was part of a nationwide wave of proposal laws linking divisive issues of race, sexual orientation and gender identity to parents’ concerns about what their children are being taught in public schools. These bills not only undermine the real progress that LGBTQ+ people have made in society over the past 50 years, Stephens wrote, but they also further erode trust in some of our most under-compensated public servants: school teachers and administrators.

On July 1, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona noted that the Florida parents and families he’d spoken with said the legislation doesn’t represent them and that it put students in danger of bullying and worse mental health outcomes.

In Cardona’s home state of Connecticut, meanwhile, the Greenwich School Board adopted a new Title IX policy unanimously, but not without controversy. Edson Rivas and Colin Hosten of the Fairfield County-based Triangle Community Center Board of Directors wrote in Connecticut Viewpoints that the policy adopted by the Greenwich School Board “conspicuously removes any language referring to gender identity and sexual orientation” which was part of the original version of the policy introduced last fall. The board replied that “this policy covers all students, whether or not certain language is included.” But Rivas and Hosten aren’t buying it. “If the substance of the policy remains the same, as they say, then the only effect of removing the language about gender identity and sexual orientation is the linguistic pseudo-erasure of the LGBTQ+ community in Greenwich Public Schools.”

Truth to tell: Recently, the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) named 75 higher-education institutions to participate in the 2022 Institute on Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers as part of an effort to dismantle racial hierarchies.

As we at NEBHE and others have wrestled with a “reckoning” on race, gender and so many other wrongs, the “truth and reconciliation” concept has always made sense to me. Check out, for example, the thoughtful book Honest Patriots exploring how true patriots in post-World War II Germany, post-apartheid South Africa and the U.S. in the the aftermath of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans loved their country enough to acknowledge and repent for its misdeeds.

Under the AAC&U initiative, campus teams develop action plans to advance the parts of the TRHT framework: narrative change, racial healing and relationship building, separation, law and economy. The institute helps campus teams to prepare to facilitate racial-healing activities on their campus and in their communities; examine current realities of race relations in their communities and the local history that has led to them; identify evidence-based strategies that support their vision of what their communities will look, feel and be like when the belief in the hierarchy of human value no longer exists, and learn to pinpoint critical levers for change and to engage key stakeholders.

Among participating New England institutions: Landmark College, Middlesex Community College, Mount Holyoke College, Suffolk University, the University of Connecticut and Westfield State University.

Another problem with over-incarceration. NEBHE has published a policy brief about the effects of higher education on incarcerated people in New England prisons and jails—and increasingly broached conversations about the dilemmas created by the world’s biggest incarcerator — America. Now, another byproduct surfaces: Children with an incarcerated parent have exceedingly low levels of education. The most common education level for respondents from a low-income family who had an incarcerated parent was elementary school, according to research by a group of Wake Forest University students who put together an article for the Nation Fund for Independent Journalism. The students set out to understand how the academic achievement, mental health and future income of children of incarcerated parents compare to those with deceased parents. Just under 60% as many respondents with an incarcerated parent completed a university education compared to the baseline of respondents with neither an incarcerated nor deceased parent.

Acquisition of Maguire: I first heard the term “Flutie Effect” in the context of former Boston College Admissions Director Jack Maguire. The term refers to the admissions deluge after the BC quarterback Doug Flutie threw the famed Hail Mary pass (caught by the less-famous Gerald Phelan) in 1984. Flutie won the Heisman Trophy, then pursued a pro career, first with Donald Trump’s New Jersey Generals in the USFL and then in the Canadian Football League, with a few bumpy stops in the NFL.

But Maguire attributed BC’s good fortune not to the diminutive quarterback but to the college’s “investments in residence halls, academic facilities, and financial aid.” In 1983, Maguire, a theoretical physicist by training, founded Maguire Associates and introduced the concept of “enrollment management,” combining sophisticated analytical techniques, customized research and deep experience in education leadership with a genuine enthusiasm for client partnerships. Maguire became a sort of admissions guru whose insights we have been pleased to feature.

Now, higher-education marketing and enrollment strategy firm Carnegie has announced it is buying Maguire Associates. Not to be confused with the foundation that administered the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, which recently moved to the American Council on Education, nor the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has encouraged disarmament, this Carnegie, also founded in the 1980s and based in Westford, Mass., is formally known as Carnegie Dartlet LLC. Its pitch: “We are right definers. We are your intelligence. We are truth revealers. We are your clarity. We are obstacle breakers. We are your partners. We are audience shapers. We are your connection. We are brand illuminators. We are your insight. We are story forgers. We are your voice. We are connection creators. …”

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

Todd J. Leach: Clearing up some confusions about student debt

Congreve Hall at the University of New Hampshire’s flagship campus, in Durham.

— Photo by Kylejtod

BOSTON

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

The student-debt narrative seems to be increasingly dominated by sensational anecdotes. I recently watched a segment on a national morning television show in which a student with $290,000 in student debt was being held up as an example of how big the problem is.

The story suggests that the cost of tuition for a four-year degree, one from a public institution in this case, is nearly $300,000. Only it isn’t, at least not for the institution that the example above was based on. In fact, the average cost of attendance at the institution used in this particular story was only $28,000 a year, according to the federal College Scorecard. One might still argue that $28,000 a year is too high an average cost for tuition, but that also includes room and board. A high-need student could receive up to $6,895 a year in Pell Grants and probably qualify for even more institutional student aid funding. In other words, a high-need student would likely be paying less than $22,000 a year.

This is not to say that there are no institutions that have a cost of attendance that could exceed $290,000, But for high-need students choosing to attend a public institution, or a low-cost pathway at a private institution, and who are eligible for full Pell Grants and institutional aid, it is still possible to find a path that is much less expensive. Some states, such as New Hampshire, offer gap programs that ensure high-need students can attend tuition free. While room and board is separate from tuition, students that are able to commute can further contain the cost of education.

So how is it a student might have two or three times in debt what it actually costs to attend four years of college?

To start with, there are many different loan types that might be lumped under the heading of student debt. As far as federal Direct Loans go, there are subsidized and unsubsidized loans. Direct subsidized loans require a student to demonstrate financial need. High-need students who are still considered “dependents” may borrow up to $23,000 in aggregate of subsidized loans (total across the four years).
In addition, those same dependent students may borrow an additional $8,000 in Direct unsubsidized loans. Independent high-need students can borrow up to $23,000 in subsidized Direct loans and an additional $34,500 in unsubsidized Direct loans. If you are keeping track of the math, it means that a dependent student may borrow up to $31,000 in Direct federal student loans and an independent student may borrow up to $57,500. Those number still do not add up to the $290,000 example showcased in the story referenced in this example.

What else could be in that $290,000 number? Several things, and almost anything. There are plenty of private loan options available that are not need-based and that have few if any restrictions on how that money can be used. In fact, not all debt incurred by students is for education purposes. Students may borrow money for vacations, cars, entertainment or to support a spouse and dependents while they are unable to work during their educational pursuits. When the numbers are self-reported, they might also include money borrowed from friends or family, as well as money the student has racked-up on their credit cards. The reality is that average Direct federal student debt is under $30,000, according to the Federal Reserve.

There have been numerous calls and proposals for debt relief, but to assess the merits of those varied proposals it is first important to understand the various forms of debt and know exactly what debt is being forgiven. It is also important to understand that debt relief would affect individual college graduates very differently.

For example, a student with no financial need who borrows $25,000 in order to fund summer travel experiences will not be affected the same way as a high-need student who minimized their debt by commuting and borrowing only $5,000.

An even greater equity issue may exist when it comes to students who avoided debt altogether. This is not to say that loan-forgiveness programs have no virtue. Like any investment, student-debt forgiveness should not only have a price tag attached to it, but also some specified goals. Some states have used loan forgiveness as a way to attract graduates to a particular region, while other programs are aimed at incentivizing students to choose particular career paths. In either of these cases, the type of loan does not matter since the objective is incentivizing choices, but if the objective is to address economic disparity or poverty in general, then the details, such as the current earning level of those receiving debt forgiveness, matters.

According to the Federal Reserve, the total amount of outstanding student debt is well above a trillion dollars, which raises one final question when assessing forgiveness options: What are the opportunity costs? Even forgiving all $1.5 trillion of outstanding debt will not lower the cost to attend college, improve access or build a stronger pipeline of graduates for the workforce the way an increase in Pell Grants would. Unfortunately, this may be a false choice. These are policy questions, and the reality may be that it is more feasible to gain support for some form of debt forgiveness than to increase direct subsidies such as Pell Grants.

Regardless of the ultimate decisions on debt forgiveness, we should be looking at ways to minimize student debt to begin with. The cost of attending a four-year institution is certainly one major factor and there are several ways that cost could be further reduced, such as: increasing Pell Grant awards; developing more low-cost delivery options (including online, community college transfer pathways and early college options); and, of course,  encouraging institutions to continuously work to find efficiencies. Debt could also be reduced by increased screening and accountability for institutions that target vulnerable students with deceptive practices, as we have seen with some for-profit institutions. The federal government has already forgiven billions of dollars in student-loan debt associated with deceptive for-profits, including $5.8 billion that resulted from the failure of Corinthian Colleges. Beyond college costs and accountability, there are other measures that could be considered and that includes greater accountability for loan providers.

There are steps institutions in general can take to ensure careful borrowing decisions on the part of students. For example, a common practice today is to actually package student loans for accepted students and put the onus on the student to turn it down rather than simply informing the student what they are eligible for should they want to take out loans. Perhaps one of the most effective tools for reducing debt is better information. While not a perfect tool, the federal College Scorecard provides information on cost of attendance and on average earnings of graduates, but I suspect very few families and students are making the Scorecard a significant part of their decision process.

Perhaps it is time to expect institutions to more prominently make data, such as their student-loan default rates, available to prospective students. Students should not just be informed how much they can borrow but what are the chances they will be able to pay it back.

Ultimately, the bigger issue may not be the amount of student debt but that graduates are struggling to pay it back. While the focus is currently on whether or not students should be liable for the totality of their student-loan debt, institutions should anticipate greater focus on their student loan default rates and the return on investment for their graduates. Once again, not all student debt is the same.

Todd J. Leach is chancellor emeritus of the University System of New Hampshire and former chair of NEBHE.

John O. Harney: Some big changes at the top

The (Brutalist) Federal Reserve Bank of Boston tower, at the edge of the Boston financial district.

— Photo by Fox-orian 

(New England Diary is catching up with this report, first published Feb. 15.)

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

BOSTON

The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston named University of Michigan Provost Susan M. Collins to be the bank’s next president and CEO. An international macroeconomist, Collins will be the first Black woman to lead a regional bank in the 108-year history of the Fed system. In addition to being the University of Michigan’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, Collins is the Edward M. Gramlich Collegiate Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics. She holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will succeed Eric Rosengren, who retired in September after 14 years leading the Boston Fed.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology President L. Rafael Reif announced he will leave the post he has held for the past decade at the end of 2022. A native of Venezuela, Reif began working at MIT as an electrical engineering professor in 1980, then served seven years as provost before being named president in 2012. Among other things, he presided over a $1 billion commitment to a new College of Computing to address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and oversaw the revitalization of MIT’s physical campus and the neighboring Kendall Square in Cambridge, Mass. Reif said he will take a sabbatical, then return to MIT’s faculty in its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Tufts University President Anthony Monaco told the campus that he will step down in the summer of 2023 after 12 years leading the university. A geneticist by training, Monaco ran a center for human genetics at Oxford University in the U.K. and, at Tufts, worked with the Broad Institute on COVID-19 testing programs that helped universities return to in-person learning. Among his accomplishments, Monaco oversaw the university’s 2016 acquisition of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as well as the removal of the “Sackler” name from its medical school after the Sackler family and its company, Purdue Pharma, were found to be key players in the opioid crisis.

The Biden administration tapped David Cash, dean of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at UMass Boston and former commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, to be the regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in New England.

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

John O. Harney: The state of the New England states as COVID winds down (for now?)

Regions of New England:

1. Northwest Vermont/Champlain Valley
2. Northeast Kingdom
3. Central Vermont
4. Southern Vermont
5. Great North Woods Region
6. White Mountains
7. Lakes Region
8. Dartmouth/Lake Sunapee Region
9. Seacoast Region
10. Merrimack Valley
11. Monadnock Region
12. Aroostook
13. Maine Highlands
14. Acadia/Down East
15. Mid-Coast/Penobscot Bay
16. Southern Maine/South Coast
17. Mountain and Lakes Region
18. Kennebec Valley
19. North Shore
20. Metro Boston
21. South Shore
22. Cape Cod and Islands
23. South Coast
24. Southeastern Massachusetts
25. Blackstone River Valley
26. Metrowest/Greater Boston
27. Central Massachusetts
28. Pioneer Valley
29. The Berkshires
30. South County
31. East Bay
32. Quiet Corner
33. Greater Hartford
34. Central Naugatuck Valley
35. Northwest Hills
36. Southeastern Connecticut/Greater New London
37. Western Connecticut
38. Connecticut Shoreline

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

BOSTON

“This Covid-19 pandemic has been part of our lives for nearly two years now. It’s what we talk about at our kitchen tables over breakfast in the morning, and again over dinner at night. It gets brought up in nearly every conversation we have throughout the day, and it’s a topic at nearly every special gathering we attend,” Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee noted in his recent 2022 State of the State address.

Indeed, that was a consistent theme among all six New England governors’ 2022 State of the State speeches. As were plugs for innovation in healthcare, especially mental health, housing, workforce development, climate strategies, children’s services, transportation, schools, budgets and, with varying degrees of gratitude, acknowledgement of federal infusions of relief money.

Here are links to the full New England State of the State addresses, highlighting some key points from the beat:

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s 2022 State of the State Address

“Our budget invests 10 times more money than ever before in workforce development—with a hyper focus on trade schools, apprentice programs and tuition-free certificate programs where students of all ages can earn an industry-recognized credential in half the time, with a full-time job all but guaranteed.

This investment will train over 10,000 students and job seekers this year in courses designed by businesses around the skills that they need.

This isn’t just about providing people with credentials; this is about changing people’s lives.

A stay-at-home mom whose husband lost his job earned her pharmacy tech certificate in three months and now works at Yale New Haven Hospital.

A man who was homeless was provided housing, transportation, a laptop and training. He’s now a user support specialist for a large tech company.

These are just two examples of opportunities that completely change the course of someone’s life.

We are working with our partners in the trade unions to develop programs for the next generation of laser welders and pipefitters. Building on the amazing partnership between Hartford Hospital and Quinnipiac University, we are also ramping up our next generation of healthcare workers.

I want students and trainees to take a job in Connecticut, and I want Connecticut employers to hire from Connecticut first! To encourage that, we’re expanding a tax credit for small businesses that help repay their employees’ student loans. More reasons for your business to hire in Connecticut, and for graduates to stay in Connecticut—that’s the Connecticut difference.”

Maine Gov. Janet Mills’s 2022 State of the State Address

“It is also our responsibility to ensure that higher education is affordable.

And I’ve got some ideas to tackle that.

First, I am proposing funding in my supplemental budget to stave off tuition hikes across the University of Maine System, to keep university education in Maine affordable.

Secondly, thinking especially about all those young people whose aspirations have been most impacted by the pandemic, I propose making two years of community college free.

To the high school classes of 2020 through 2023—if you enroll full-time in a Maine community  college this fall or next, the State of Maine will cover every last dollar of your tuition so you can obtain a one-year certificate or two-year associate degree and graduate unburdened by debt and ready to enter the workforce.

And if you are someone who’s already started a two-year program, we’ve got your back too. We will cover the last dollar of your second year.”

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s 2022 State of the State Address

“We increased public school spending by $1.6 billion, and fully funded the game-changing Student Opportunity Act.

We invested over $100 million in modernizing equipment at our vocational and technical programs, bringing opportunities to thousands of students and young adults.

We dramatically expanded STEM programming, and we helped thousands of high school students from Gateway Cities earn college credits free through our Early College programs.”

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu’s State of the State Address

“Our way of life here in the 603 is the best of the best.

We didn’t get here by accident—we did it through smart management, prioritizing individuals over government, citizens over systems, and delivering results with the immense responsibility of properly managing our citizens tax dollars.

As other states were forced to buckle down and weather the storm, we took a more proactive approach in 2021. In just the last year, we:

• Cut the statewide property tax by $100 million to provide relief to New Hampshire taxpayers
• Cut the rooms and meals tax
• Cut business taxes—again
• Began permanently phasing out the interest and dividends tax

And while we heard scary stories of how cutting taxes and returning such large amounts of money to citizens and towns would ‘cost too much’, the actual results have played out exactly as we planned, record tax revenue pouring into New Hampshire, exceeding all surplus estimates, allowing us to double the State’s Rainy Day Fund to over $250 million.”

Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee’s State of the State Address

“We all know that the economy was changing well before the pandemic. A college degree or credential is a basic qualification for over 70 percent of jobs created since 2008. Although we have made great progress over the last decade, there’s more to do.

Let’s launch Rhode Island’s first Higher Ed Academy, a statewide effort to meet Rhode Islanders where they are and provide access to education and training, that leads to a good-paying job. Through this initiative, which will be run by our Postsecondary Education Commissioner Shannon Gilkey, we expect to support over a thousand Rhode Islanders helping them gain the skills needed to be successful in obtaining a credential or degree.

Having a strong, educated workforce is critical for a strong economy—and Rhode Island’s economy is built on small businesses. Small businesses employ over half of our workforce. As these businesses continue to recover from the pandemic, we know that challenges still persist. That’s why in the first several weeks of my administration, I put millions of unspent CARES Act dollars that we received in 2020 into grants to help more than 3,600 small businesses stay afloat.

My budget will call for key small business supports like more funding for small business grants, especially for severely impacted industries like tourism and hospitality. It will also increase grant funding for Rhode Island’s small farms.

As our businesses deal with workforce challenges, I’ll also propose more funding to forgive student loan debt, especially for health-care professionals, and $40 million to continue the Real Jobs Rhode Island program which has already helped thousands of Rhode Islanders get back to work.”

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott’s State of the State Address

“The hardest part of addressing our workforce shortage is that it is so intertwined with other big challenges, from affordability and education to our economy and recovery. Each problem makes the others harder to solve, creating a vicious cycle that’s been difficult to break.

Specifically, I believe our high cost of living has contributed to a declining workforce and stunted our growth. As we lose Vermonters who cannot afford to live, do business or even retire here, that burden—from taxes and utility rates to healthcare and education costs—falls on fewer and fewer of us, making life even less affordable.

With fewer working families comes fewer kids in our schools. But lower enrollment hasn’t meant lower costs and from district to district, kids are not offered the same opportunities, like foreign languages, AP courses or electives. And with fewer school offerings, it is hard to attract families, workers and jobs to those communities.

Fewer workers and fewer students mean our businesses struggle to fill the jobs they need to survive, deepening the economic divide from region to region.

And for years, state budgets and policies failed to adapt to this reality. …

Let’s start with the people already here and do more to connect them with great jobs.

First, our internship, returnship and apprenticeship programs have been incredibly successful, not only giving workers job experience, but also building ties to local employers. To improve on this work, the Department of Labor assists employers to fill and manage internships statewide and we’ll invest more to help cover interns’ wages.

And let’s not forget about retired Vermonters who want to go back to work and have a lot to offer. I look forward to working with Representative Marcotte and the House Commerce Committee on this issue and may others.

Next, let’s put a greater focus on trades training. And here’s why:

We all know we need more nurses and healthcare workers. And as I previewed with {state} Senator Sanders and {state} Senator Balint earlier this week, I will propose investments in this area. But if we don’t have enough CDL drivers, mechanics and technicians, hospital staff won’t get to work; there will be issues getting the life-saving equipment and supplies we need; and we will see fewer EMTs available to get patients to emergency rooms. If we don’t have enough carpenters, plumbers and electricians, or heating, ventilation, air handling and refrigeration techs, there are fewer to construct and maintain the facilities in our health-care system or build homes for the workers we are trying to attract.”

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

Josh M. Beach: Why we can’t measure what matters in U.S. education

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

BOSTON

What do students learn in school? In the 21st Century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer.

The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? And yet, when you investigate the education-accountability movement, especially in the U.S. where it began, you realize that the preoccupation with student learning is not about education. Calls for accountability have always been more focused on politics and economics.

Accountability metrics were created to sort and rank students, teachers and schools in order to create a competition where some are winners and most are losers. This type of competitive environment creates fear, and it is not conducive to learning or high performance.

Most student learning, especially the most important types of social learning and formative interactions, happens outside school, especially in early childhood. These personal experiences later go on to affect students’ performance in schools. The most important variables that affect a student’s school achievement are environmental. They occur outside schools and affect children long before they ever set foot in a school. These three variables, which are deeply intertwined, are the social construction of: race, parental income and wealth, and parental education (especially the highest level of schooling that parents achieve).

All three of these variables are proxies for a wide range of social and economic resources that can help students learn and succeed in school, such as parenting skills and child development, especially the time parents spend talking to and reading with children, proper nutrition, access to tutors and extracurricular activities, access to top-quality schools with the best teachers, and also peer networks.

Most policymakers and school administrators talk as if schools and teachers have complete control over the student learning process, but most of the important variables that determine student success, especially in terms of learning and graduating, are beyond the control of teachers or schools.

As W. Edwards Deming pointed out, “Common sense tells us to rank children in school (grade them), rank people on the job, rank teams, divisions … Reward the best, punish the worst.” (This common-sense belief is wrong, especially, as Deming emphasized, when it comes to schooling, where the objectives are supposed to be student learning and personal development.)

Over the past half century, social scientists have found that there can be many unintended and adverse consequences when high-stake metrics get linked to individual or institutional evaluations tied to punishments and rewards.

This predicament is often called Campbell’s Law. The psychologist and social scientist Donald T. Campbell explained in 1976, “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”

A British economist put it more bluntly in what is now called Goodhart’s Law: “Any measure used for control is unreliable.”

According to Campbell, “When tests scores become the goal of the teaching process, they both lose their value as indicators of educational status and distort the educational process in undesirable ways.”

How have accountability measurements corrupted schools? Take high-stakes standardized testing as a perfect example. Many teachers now spend most of their classroom time teaching to the tests by giving students “tricks” to answer multiple-choice tests or “ways to game the rules used to score the tests,” according to Harvard Graduate School of Education Prof. Daniel Koretz. Students engage in little, if any, real or useful learning.

Grade inflation

Teachers have also been lowering their standards and inflating grades to make students look much more successful academically than they actually are. Some administrators have been manipulating the tested population of students to make sure the lowest-performing students don’t take high-stakes tests. Sometimes, this has taken the form of transferring low-achieving students to other schools or encouraging them to drop out of school. And most shamefully, some teachers and administrators have been engaging in plain old cheating by falsifying student achievement scores.

To make matters worse, because performance measures cannot be verified, judgments of quality are made on existing data, which can be manipulated, or can be partially or wholly fraudulent. This leads to the adverse selection of personnel, whereby deceitful agents who post the best performance markers get rewarded, even though their numbers may be questionable, if not fraudulent.

Often, as Koretz points out, “the wrong schools and programs” get “rewarded or punished, and the wrong practices may be touted as successful and emulated.” The opposite is also true. Honest, hard-working and effective teachers, with true but lackluster performance measures, are passed over for promotion, criticized, sanctioned or fired. Such moral hazards create a perverse Darwinian scenario: Survival of the corrupt.

When performance goals are mandated from above without employee input, subordinates are forced to follow meaningless targets without any intrinsic motivation. Thus, the only incentive for workers to succeed are extrinsic rewards, often money, which leads to shortcuts or fraud to get the monetary reward. Staff begin chasing performance markers for the monetary incentives without knowing about or caring about the fundamental purposes of the organization or the rationale behind accountability goals.

Thus, when it comes to schools, whenever lawmakers or administrators institute a single, predictable measure of academic performance linked to extrinsic rewards, whether it be for students, teachers, or the whole school, someone somewhere will be cheating to game the system.

A 2013 Government Accounting Office report concluded that “officials in 40 states reported allegations of cheating in the past two school years, and officials in 33 states confirmed at least one instance of cheating. Further, 32 states reported that they canceled, invalidated or nullified test scores as a result of cheating.” One scholarly study estimated that “serious cases of teacher or administrator cheating on standardized tests occur in a minimum of 4-5 percent of elementary school classrooms annually.” Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg sardonically quipped, “Fudging data on student performance” has been “the only education strategy that consistently gets results.”

Nationwide in the U.S., we are seeing the consequences of this cynical calculation. For decades, researchers have documented rampant social promotion and grade inflation in K-12 schools and in most institutions of higher education. Koretz has argued that grade inflation is not only “pervasive,” but also “severe,” so much so that he argued that this type of subtle cheating is “central to the failure of American education ‘reform.’”

In Houston, as an example, some high schools were officially reporting zero dropouts and 100% of their students planning to attend college, and yet one principal joked, most of her students “couldn’t spell college, let alone attend.” While Texas pioneered accountability reforms in K-12 education, which became national policy through George W. Bush’s landmark No Child Left Behind law, researchers have documented how those reforms led to the corruption of education in Texas. Policymakers and administrators lost sight of education in a push to fudge the numbers so they could secure public accolades, get more funding and build bigger football stadiums.

And what is the impact of grade inflation on students? While students no doubt like high grades that they have not academically earned, they are actually harmed a great deal by such educational fraud. First of all, students become complacent and are unmotivated to learn because they think they already know it all. When students are confronted with higher academic standards in the future, they are liable to wilt under the pressure and either blame themselves or the teacher for the difficulty of authentic learning.

Disadvantaged students hurt most

To make matters worse, grade inflation affects disadvantaged students the most. Poor students and ethnic minorities, who are often segregated in the lowest-performing schools in the poorest neighborhoods, often receive the most inflated grades. This is because their teachers often can’t teach effectively due to various social, economic and environmental conditions that obstruct the learning process.

And what happens when academically underachieving high-school students fail upwards and make it into college, mostly through the open-door community college? They are then confronted with the fact that they are unprepared for academic success.

Large percentages of freshmen in the U.S. have to start college with remedial classes because they were not adequately prepared in high school. Most of these remedial college students eventually drop out of college, for various reasons, never earning a degree, and often with substantial amounts of student debt. However, many are also just passed through the college system with inflated grades and little learning.

For decades, researchers have documented the lowering of academic standards and the inflation of grades at institutions of higher education all across the U.S., especially at community colleges.

Graduating with a degree

High grades also seem to be inversely correlated with the main measure of student success in college, which is graduating with a degree. Currently, over 80% of all college students in the U.S. are earning A or B grades, but less than half of students who enroll in higher education will actually graduate with a bachelor’s degree.

As college admissions rose, graduation rates declined from the 1970s to the 1990s because standards remained relatively high. But as admissions continued to rise, graduation rates began to increase starting in the 1990s. Students were no more academically prepared, in fact, they were less prepared, so the increase in completion rates was mostly likely due to political and administrative pressure. New accountability reforms most likely contributed to a lowering of standards, especially at non-selective public colleges and universities.

Education researchers Ernest T. Pascarella and Patrick T. Terenzini pointed out in 2005 that only about half of all college graduates “appear to be functioning at the most proficient levels of prose, document or quantitative literacy,” which means that all those inflated A and B grades aren’t translating into actual knowledge or skill, putting many college graduates at a disadvantage when they enter the labor market, and putting many firms at risk because they have hired ignorant and incompetent college graduates.

While it is certainly reasonable for teachers to use tests and grades to evaluate and measure student learning, these tools are not easy to implement in a valid way that promotes student learning and development. As Jack Schneider of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, notes, “Measuring something as complicated as student learning” is very difficult, even under the best of circumstances, but almost impossible when it has to be done in a “uniform and cost-restricted way.” {Mr. Schneider is associate professor of leadership in education at UMass Lowell and director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment.}

Josh M. Beach is the author of a number of interdisciplinary titles, including How Do You Know?: The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy and Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States. He is the founder and director of 21st Century Literacy, a nonprofit organization focused on literacy education and teacher training.

Georgian-style Longfellow Hall at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, in Cambridge, Mass. It’s named for the daughter of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous 19th Century poet and scholar.

What colleges owe our democracy

The Seeley G. Mudd Building at Amherst College, the elite small liberal-arts college in the Massachusetts town of the same name that has abolished legacy admissions. The striking building, for math and computer science, was designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes and John MY Lee and Partners with Funds donated by the Seeley G. Mudd Foundation, named for a physician and philanthropist who lived from 1895 to 1968 and didn’t attend Amherst.

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

WATERTOWN, Mass.

What Universities Owe Democracy; Ronald J. Daniels with Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector; Johns Hopkins University Press; Baltimore; 2021.

When the president of a major university publishes a deeply researched, closely reasoned, strongly argued powerful idea and call to the profession to respond to an urgent crisis in our national history, it is highly likely to become a classic in the literature of higher education. Ronald Daniels, president of Johns Hopkins University (co-authoring with colleagues Grant Shreve and Phillip Spector), has accomplished that with this new book, appropriately entitled What Universities Owe Democracy.

The New England Journal of Higher Education has responded to the widely recognized “epistemic crisis” in our democracy in two previous articles this year. The first, in April, unpacked the economic, technological, psychological and moral aspects of the problem, to focus on higher education’s purview of epistemology, and contended that it is incumbent upon all public educators—including journalists and jurists—from secondary schools onward, to insist that “thinking on the basis of evidence” is the only reliable way to establish and use the power of knowledge in any field. The second, in September, was a critical review of the journalist Jonathan Rauch’s recent book, The Constitution of Knowledge, asserting that he offered not a solution but part of the problem—that the epistemic crisis in public (or popular) knowledge, Rauch’s actual subject, is exacerbated by journalism’s misconceived habit of promoting as criteria of truth broad public acceptance and trust, rather than thinking on the basis of evidence.

The fundamental issue underlying both those articles—that scholars and scientists have civic responsibility—has now been addressed by Daniels, who has been previously known as a leading advocate for eliminating legacy admissions at prestigious institutions, which he did at Hopkins in 2014. His example was followed by a few others, most recently Amherst College.

The excellence of his book derives from his extraordinary idealism for higher education and the essential, indispensable role of colleges and universities in what he carefully defines as “liberal democracy.” His basic argument is that the welfare of American universities and of democracy have historically been and are strongly interdependent, so it is now necessarily in the academy’s interest to defend democracy from subversion. He poses as the “relevant question,” “How does the university best foster democracy in our society?”

His answer is painstakingly developed. Each of the book’s four chapters features careful definition of terms, a highly informative history of the chapter’s specific issue in American higher education, an analysis of its current challenges, and the author’s policy recommendations. The discussion is lucid, intellectually rigorous, and considerate of the complexities involved. This brief review cannot do justice to his detailed arguments, so I shall highlight a few points of broad interest.

A leitmotif throughout the book is what Daniels calls “liberal democracy,” which he defines in detail as an Enlightenment ideal: “liberal” in favoring individual freedom, “democracy” in promoting political equality and popular sovereignty. Whereas the two can occasionally conflict, society’s common good depends on their equitable balance. On these ideals, he writes, the United States is predicated.

The first chapter focuses on the “American Dream” of social mobility for this (in JFK’s phrase) “nation of immigrants.” Daniels elucidates the pre-eminent role universities have played in promoting it; no other institution, he says, has been throughout our history and still today more influential in that essential function. “Universities are one of the few remaining places where Americans of different backgrounds are guaranteed to encounter one another.” Therefore, colleges and universities must ensure that everything they do contributes to social mobility. This is where the issue of legacy admissions arises—about which, see more to follow.

The next chapter, “Free Minds” concerns civic education. Citizenship must be cultivated; it is not an innate trait. This used to be done by civics courses required at the high school level but in recent decades, that has languished, yielding ground to the rise of science and separate specialized disciplines. Today, only 25% of secondary schools require civic education, but because 70% of students go on to some form of postsecondary education or training, that is where, by default, civic education must be revived. Daniels advocates a “renaissance in civic learning” to reaffirm how the Founders envisioned higher education in our democracy. Noting that robust civics education is unlikely to be recovered by high schools in today’s polarized political environment, he presents a strong historical case for the inclusion of promoting democratic citizenship in higher education. Acknowledging the wide diversity of institutional types and cultures in postsecondary education today, he encourages every institution to develop its own approach.

Daniels then turns to the central role of universities in the creation, promotion and defense of knowledge, upon which liberal democracy is necessarily based. American universities have uniquely combined within single institutions their own undergraduate colleges, professional graduate schools, research facilities and scholarly publishing, protected by academic freedom and tenure. This powerful and mutually reinforcing combination has produced intellectual leadership in our liberal democracy. All this has been potently challenged, however, by developments in modern philosophy (linguistic analysis and epistemology) and more recently information technology (computers, the internet, social networks and artificial intelligence). Daniels courageously addresses these extremely complex and subtle issues (e.g., post-structuralism) in detail. His discussion is enlightening and supports his thesis that universities have a crucial role to play in intellectual leadership, “building a new knowledge ecosystem” that will protect and strengthen liberal democracy.

The next chapter “Purposeful Pluralism” discusses how colleges and universities may promote both greater diversity in their student bodies and genuine mixing of their constituencies by cultivating more inclusive communications and mutual understanding. But while greater diversification has been increased by deliberate admissions strategies, there needs to be sustained follow-through in the infrastructures of student life—in housing and rooming arrangements, dining, socializing, curricular and extracurricular settings, including faculty-student interactions and intellectual life in general. “Our universities should be at the forefront of modeling a healthy, multiethnic democracy.”

He concludes then by reviewing the overall argument, its urgency, and “avenues for reform,” which include: 1) End legacy admissions and restore federal financial aid, 2) Institute a democracy requirement for graduation, 3) Embrace “open” science’ with guardrails and 4) Reimagine student encounters on campus and infuse debate into campus programming. “The university cannot, as an institution, afford to be agnostic about, or indifferent to, its opposition to authoritarianism, its support for human dignity and freedom, its commitment to a tolerant multiracial society, or its insistence on truth and fact as the foundation for collective decision-making,” Daniels writes. “It is hardly hyperbole to say that nothing less than the protection of our basic liberties is at stake.”

While I may not completely agree with all the positions Daniels takes, I strongly believe that every academic reader will find this book highly illuminating, practically useful, and I hope, compelling. One relatively minor point of difference I have is where today’s vexed issue of legacy admissions is directly addressed. Daniels acknowledges that though the numbers of admissions decisions involved is relatively small, their symbolic significance is large, especially owing to the prominence of the institutions involved. The practice is followed by 70 of the top 100 colleges in the U.S. News rankings and, though it affects only 10% to 12% of their comparatively small numbers of students, it sends a message that is widely interpreted as elitist and undemocratic. Daniels focuses more on opposing the message than upon analyzing the practice in detail, and he provides no hard data on the process or results of the elimination of the policy anywhere.

This stood out for me as an odd departure from his usual data-intensive analytical habit. One reason for its exception is that he considers the message more important than the practical details, but another might be that data have not yet shown the abolition of legacy admissions to have significant practical impact on social mobility. Still another might be that, as I understand it, the reasons for which legacies were created are not the reasons for which they should now be abolished. They were instituted and are maintained primarily for internal institutional purposes—i.e., to encourage alumni engagement and fundraising—and not for any public message.

Here we may connect a few separate dots, not presented together in the book. Daniels abolished the practice at Hopkins in 2014 but did not announce it publicly until 2019. In that interval, he also sought and secured in 2018 a sensational gift from Hopkins alumnus Michael Bloomberg, of $1.8 billion for student financial aid. While it is understandable that Daniels would be reluctant to discuss this historical process in detail, or whether it was planned from the start and enabled by a unique advantage Hopkins had with Bloomberg as an alumnus, it is also conceivable that the Hopkins decision was not problem-free, and that the extremely generous grant was invoked as a solution.

In any case, avoiding the practical issue in the book also avoids considering a possible (though admittedly unforeseeable) solution for other institutions now—i.e., taking advantage of the unprecedentedly high multibillion-dollar gains in 2020 endowment yields and personal capital to use them separately or together to make major investments in student financial aid. This may, in other words, be an opportune time to modify legacy policies—perhaps to retain them in some refined or reduced form as an instrument supporting both student diversity and strengthening alumni relations and fundraising, while heading off the public ­impression of elitism.

The world is changing fast, and it is essential that universities keep up the pace. Political reform is slow and now especially cumbersome, whereas the only impediment to universities adapting and leading is the will to do so. That is where a book such as this can exert palpable influence, and considering how rare it is for such a book to be written, are we not in turn professionally obliged at least to read and think about it?

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, based in Watertown, Mass.

Battaglia/Corcoran/Rhodes and Simon: Adopting cheaper college learning materials

The formidable-looking Science Building at Eastern Connecticut State University, in Willimantic

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

The 17-institution Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System (CSCU) formed a systemwide open educational resources (OER) Council in 2017 that was primarily focused on the adoption of no-cost or low-cost (NOLO) course materials as a means to provide equitable access to learning materials.

Our CSCU consortium of library directors partnered with the OER Council to construct a Web site, OpenCSCU, providing curated OER, a support network and a faculty-recognition program. The OER Council also has hosted annual OER workshops. Additionally, the CSCU system office funded a “mini-grant” program to further assist adoption. Much of the council’s focus and its connected OER efforts have been centered on equitable access to affordable learning materials. Over time, the council has expanded its focus to include open practices as a critical component to diversity, equity and inclusion in support of student success.

Even as we made strides in expanding the reach and focus of our OER efforts, the council recognized a communication gap persisted. The primary means of disseminating information from the council had been its representatives. We recognized that our institutions may have been at varying levels of engagement with OER and that our council representatives may have had competing priorities. It became clear that to better serve our institutions we needed to create a centralized communication channel to provide broader engagement and reach. Enter the blog.

With the OpenCSCU site established as a clearinghouse for OER-related information, it was a natural progression to take advantage of the existing technology for this new communications effort. Recognizing the limitations of our previous communications methods, which relied heavily on email, the council sought to better utilize the OpenCSCU Web site feature set. The website runs off the Springshare LibGuides platform and provides a blog option that is flexible and visually appealing. Creating posts with persistent URLs (such as “/blog” vs. system-generated code) and a consistent location would allow us to easily disseminate up-to-date content more widely beyond the confines of email, such as through social media channels and other means of link sharing.

The CSCU OER Council formed a task force to explore how the blog could support the council’s goals of broader dissemination of open practices, recognizing the work of practitioners and advocates and growing the open community.

Creating the blog

As the task force began its work, we felt compelled to establish guiding principles for this initiative. We wanted our OER efforts to be deeply rooted in equity as well as community members’ innovations and successes. A consistent piece of feedback we had received from our previous efforts was a call for more perspectives from faculty and less from staff and administration. (After all, our faculty are the primary audience.) As a result, we decided early on that our featured posts would focus on faculty practitioners and their application of open practices and principles within their courses but also would include perspectives of students, staff and administration.

The lengthiest discussions centered around determining editorial standards for the blog. The task force looked to established academic blogs for insights and inspiration. The New England Board for Higher Education and its New England Journal of Higher Education provided some invaluable guidance to help us move forward. The WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies (WCET) also shared documented standards for its long-running blog site, Frontiers.

As a result, our standards focused on acceptable content and tone, readability and accessibility, format, media usage, licensing and the editorial review process. As OER advocates, we emphasized the requirement of open licensing for submitted content.

The OER Council’s blog task force made a conscience decision to solicit selected authors versus issuing a broad call. Our intent was to recruit three to four innovative faculty to share their stories in Year One of launching this new initiative. This approach ensured that we had a full year of highly relevant content. In future years, we will be providing an online form for interested individuals to submit proposals.

In determining the quarterly release schedule, we considered how our featured blog posts might correspond with national and regional events such as the Open Ed Conference, Open Ed Week, and the Northeast OER Summit, to coincide with heightened interest in OER. In addition to our invited authors, we agreed that we would supplement the quarterly features with timely and relevant news and events, spotlighting professional development and grant opportunities

The future of the blog

On Sept. 21, the OpenCSCU Blog was launched. Its featured post was entitled “Presenting and Promoting Open Pedagogy Through Different Frameworks” by Nicolas Simon, an assistant professor at Eastern Connecticut State University who was joined by three of his students: Tara Nguyen, Jean Rienzo and Maya Vanderberg. With feedback still coming in, the editorial board has shifted to planning the next featured post and identifying newsworthy items to share in the interim.

We plan to present practical examples that can be replicated by others, including an in-depth look at open pedagogy, regaining intellectual property rights, and publishing an open text. Looking beyond the next scheduled releases, the editorial board in conjunction with the full OER Council have started to explore the next steps for the blog. In the short term, the editorial board will establish and publish criteria for selection. In the long term, we will explore how the blog can facilitate two-way conversations.

Overall, we intend to provide guidance and support to readers by demonstrating the value of open content and practices to better serve student success. As we share more content, we hope that our reader base will grow and that our blog posts will encourage conversation and innovation in open education.  We hope to generate broader awareness of open practices and build a community of practice that not only validates and normalizes open pedagogy, but also inspires new efforts.

Hayley Battaglia is the serials & electronic resources librarian at Hilton C. Buley Library of Southern Connecticut State University. She is a member of the CSCU OER Advisory Council, chair of the OER Committee at Buley Library, a graduate of the Creative Commons Certificate Course and editor of the OpenCSCU Blog.

Kevin Corcoran is the executive director for digital learning at the Connecticut State Colleges & Universities System. He currently chairs the CSCU OER Advisory Council and the statewide Connecticut OER Coordinating Council and serves on the NEBHE OER Advisory Board.

Eileen Rhodes currently serves as the interim director of the Connecticut State Community College Library. Prior to this, she served as director of library services at Capital Community College in Hartford, Conn., for more than seven years. She is an OER advocate, initiating a “NOLO” labeling program at her college to identify courses with no-cost/low-cost course materials. 

Nicolas P. Simon is an assistant professor of sociology at Eastern Connecticut State University. The supplemental works co-authored with his students have been featured in Introduction to Sociology, third edition, published by OpenStax. 

George McCully: Rauch book tries to ‘socialize knowledge’

“Knowledge’’ (1896), by Robert Reid, at the Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

BOSTON

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

Book Review

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth; Jonathan Rauch; Brookings Institution Press; Washington D.C.; 2021.

Reviewed by George McCully 

This is a prominent and timely book by a distinguished journalist on a subject of profound national significance, especially for our educational and scholarly professions as NEJHE has previously noted. Yet, despite its many admirable features and high praise from leading commentators, I found the book’s argument and potential value fundamentally undermined by a surprising misconception of its central subject.

The book contends that, as with our national political Constitution, we have a “Constitution of Knowledge,” which works to channel our civic discourse in constructive directions by defining the bounds of proper intellectual customs. By acting as a filter for debates among contending parties, it sorts out true, good and beautiful ideas from their opposites, over time pointing us in progressive directions. This Constitution developed concurrently with our federal Constitution, over centuries leading to the Enlightenment, with the rise of “liberal science” and progressive ideals. Recent psychological experiments have shown, however, that humans can be and often are driven by irrational impulses to act selfishly and against the common good. The current revolution in information and communication technology has been used maliciously to favor and manipulate those impulses, as shown by our recent politics, especially under Trump. Therefore, we need now to revive and strengthen this Constitution of Knowledge in our politics and civil affairs. All this is certainly a plausible argument.

Plausible, but not persuasive. The epitome of its problems is its misleading title, promising far more than the book delivers. This is not a book about “knowledge” per se, but about public knowledge. It does not offer a defense of “truth” per se, but rather an extensively researched and fervent attack against current political malpractices of mis- and dis-information, with numerous suggestions of ways to oppose and avoid them. The result is that the whole argument is weaker than expected.

The book’s essential flaw is its socialization of “knowledge.” It does not consider an assertion to be valid or true unless it has persuaded people and been accepted socially. Rauch writes (emphases mine): “The only way to validate a [specific proposition] is to submit it to the reality-based community.” He adds: “[L]iberal science’s distinctive qualities derive from two core rules: … the fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say” and “the empirical rule: No one has personal authority … Crucially, then, the empirical rule is a social principle. …”

In other words, if you and I, in our research, make some new and original discoveries based on adequate evidence, those discoveries according to Rauch’s book are not “knowledge” until other people agree with them. I found his exclusively social emphasis about “knowledge” more than a bit weird. It reminded me of the old saw about the questionable sound of an unobserved tree falling in the middle of a forest, or perhaps more pointedly of the politically incorrect joke, “If I say something and my wife doesn’t hear it, is it still wrong?” By focusing on this socialization, the book fails to promote the simple but powerful antidote we need: namely, thinking on the basis of evidence—the routine practice of all modern scholarship, science and jurisprudence, accessible by all educators and citizens.

In fact, this socialized approach to knowledge is exactly what has rendered knowledge more, not less, vulnerable to the malicious and corrupt mis- and dis-information newly empowered by the IT revolution. It is what has caused, for example, a currently reported 88,000 people per week to fight Covid with the livestock de-wormer Ivermectin which they can buy from agricultural feed stores. In contrast, the authentic empirical practice of grounding knowledge in evidence is invulnerable by communications techniques. If what good citizens promote and defend is itself demonstrably unshakeable, the cause of truth in democracy can be more effectively strengthened and defended. This book shows no awareness of this.

Moreover, conceiving knowledge in exclusively sociopolitical terms has encouraged the odd analogy Rauch has drawn to a “Constitution of Knowledge” comparable to our federal Constitution in that it governs (public) knowledge. But this comparison is obviously flawed—the alleged “Constitution of Knowledge” has no Article VI, Section 2, explicitly making it the “supreme law of the land” nor Article III, Section 1, vesting “judicial power in one supreme court” of a few officials, backed by a huge and elaborate law enforcement apparatus. Participation in Rauch’s “Constitution of Knowledge” is purely voluntary. While it is customary though not infallible among professionals, it does not guide popular thinking or discussion outside the professions and is highly vulnerable by today’s hyper-powerful communications technology in vicious hands.

In short, this important book is basically at odds with itself. While it is true that the public in general does not “think on the basis of evidence” and relies for verification on trusting other people, this is what has caused the much-discussed epistemic crisis of our democracy. Our resulting sociopolitical polarization and mutually antagonistic tribal cultures are what prevent our electorates and representatives from objectively deciding on the relative merits of various candidates and ideas. The symbiosis of journalism with civil opinions, which Rauch’s book exemplifies, is at the heart of our crisis. We need journalism and public discourse to be based on and promoting reliance on evidence, not public opinions.

I am reluctant to say this, but to this journal’s readership it bears notice: The strangeness to us of this book’s argument derives from its journalistic, rather than scholarly or scientific, habit. The sea in which journalism swims is entirely sociopolitical; that is why “fairness” and “balance” in reporting various perspectives have long been promoted as criteria of public value by schools of professional journalism. For journalists, it is understandable that “knowledge” is likely to mean “public knowledge” based on social acceptance. In contrast, the graduate schools that have trained us in professional research promote “truth” which we take to be synonymous with “knowledge” as our sole professional objective and criterion of value. For scholars (and scientists) “knowledge” is gained only by adherence to adequate evidence. Many of us in the course of our professional careers have made new and original factual discoveries, which we consider new “knowledge” even before their publication and indeed as an elementary criterion for publication in the first place.

This is a gap that needs now to be bridged, not smudged nor insisted upon. This means that we—the community of scholars and educators (including journalists)—have a substantial civic role and responsibility to collaborate in protecting democracy from its current detractors, by energetically teaching and promoting thinking on the basis of evidence in all public discourse, especially including popular journalism. When any assertion is made in civic arenas, the first question by journalists—always and predictably so that everyone becomes accustomed to it—should be, “What’s your evidence?”

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.

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: Latest people moves at N.E. colleges

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

BOSTON

The New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund named Makeeba McCreary to be the first president of the fund launched by 19 local Black and Brown executives a few weeks after the killing of George Floyd. McCreary recently served as chief of learning and community engagement at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and, before that, as managing director and senior advisor of external affairs for the Boston Public Schools.

University of Maine System Chancellor Dannel Malloy said he would ask system trustees to approve the appointment of Vice President of Academic Affairs and Provost Joseph Szakas as interim president at the University of Maine at Augusta (UMA), while the system searches for a permanent replacement for UMA President Rebecca Wyke. In July, Wyke informed the UMA community that she would step down to become CEO of the Maine Public Employees Retirement System. Szakas will continue in his VP and provost roles while serving as interim leader.

Mark Fuller, who became interim chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth in January, was named permanent chancellor this week. He previously served for nine years as dean of the UMass Amherst Isenberg School of Management.

Ryan Messmore, former president of Australia’s Campion College, became the fifth president of Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, N.H.

Sharale W. Mathis joined Holyoke Community College as vice president of academic and student affairs. A biologist, she previously was dean of academic and student affairs at Middlesex Community College in Connecticut and STEM division director at Manchester Community College. Mathis was an early adopter of Open Educational Resources (OER), utilizing online resources for supplemental instruction designating that course as no cost to students.

Middlebury College appointed Caitlin Goss as its vice president for human resources and chief people officer. Goss previously served as the director of people and culture at Rhino Foods in Burlington, Vt., and as the team leader for employee engagement in global human capital at Bain & Company.

Johnson & Wales University appointed former Norwich University Executive Vice President of Operations Sandra Affenito to be vice chancellor of academic administration, and Mary Meixell, an industrial engineer and former senior associate dean of Quinnipiac University’s School of Business, to be dean of JWU’s College of Business.

Berkshire Community College appointed Stephen Vieira, former chief information officer for the Tennessee Board of Regents and at the Community College of Rhode Island, to be director of information technology at the Pittsfield, Mass., community college.

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

George McCully: America’s crisis of knowledge

Pinoccchio

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

There has been a growing consensus among authorities, especially in the Trump era, that the U.S. is in an epistemological crisis that threatens our democracy.

Former President Obama, for example, in a recent Atlantic interview, said: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition, our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”

If this is true, it is an issue which the academic and journalistic communities—i.e. those in charge of the public’s knowledge and education nationwide—need to address.

There are plenty of indications that Obama was right. The 2020 election intensified this awareness. David Brooks, in his New York Times column of Nov. 27, wrote that “77 percent of Trump backers said Joe Biden had won the presidential election because of fraud. Many of these same people think climate change is not real. Many of these same people believe they don’t need to listen to scientific experts on how to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. We live in a country in epistemological crisis, in which much of the Republican Party has become detached from reality.”

On that same day, Michael Gordon, in an op-ed for The Washington Post, wrote: “Journalism is important, and there should be more of it. An informed electorate, in the long run, will have better democratic outcomes. But the urgent problem of American politics is not an insufficient airing of policy disagreements; it is that policy views have become a function of cultural identity. A matter such as climate disruption, for example, attracts comparatively little informed and reasoned disagreement. Climate skepticism has become a tenet of populism—a revolt against elitist scientists and liberal politicians seeking excuses for social and economic control. The denial of climate change has become a cultural signifier, the policy equivalent of a gun rack in a truck.”

Multidimensional crisis

The crisis has several dimensions beyond the intellectual one. Robin Givhan, in her Washington Post column on Feb. 17, 2021, reported: “Surveys have shown that political polarization along educational lines has deepened. The gap between college-educated voters and non-college-educated voters has grown steadily over the past 60 years. The 2020 presidential election hinged on the diploma divide, which in turn, contributes to differences in income, household wealth, jobs, place of residence, cultural values and access to opportunity. … For the past four decades, incomes rose for college degree holders even as they fell for those without one, generating frustration, resentment and anger. With nearly three-quarters of new jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree, excluding nearly two-thirds of adults, earnings are linked to learning in ways that weren’t true during the 1950s and 1960s.”

There is also a technological dimension. Whereas it used to be thought that the internet would enhance democracy, we have seen an opposite effect. Thomas Edsall, in The New York  Times, also on Feb. 17, wrote that “a decade ago, the consensus was that the digital revolution would give effective voice to millions of previously unheard citizens. Now, in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, the consensus has shifted to anxiety that such online behemoths as Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge—confounding what is true and what is untrue—eroding the foundations of democracy.”

Nathaniel Persily, a Stanford University law professor, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The Internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms.” He wrote that “in a matter of just a few years the widely shared utopian vision of the nternet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse. Since then that promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for Internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement and foreign interference in elections.”

He continued, “Margaret Roberts, a University of California-San Diego political scientist, says bluntly, ‘The difficult part about social media is that the freedom of information online can be weaponized to undermine democracy.'” In an email to Edsall, she wrote, “Social media isn’t inherently pro[-] or anti-democratic, but it gives voice and the power to organize to those who are typically excluded by more mainstream media. In some cases, these voices can be liberalizing, in others illiberal.” We are reminded that while Franklin Roosevelt used radio for fireside chats to promote his liberal agenda, Hitler was using it to promote his fascism.

Today, the new technology is more dangerous, because with AI, it becomes progressively easier to disguise mis- or disinformation as authentic news, and to scrape data from users’ devices to then target the citizens most likely to be vulnerable to dissuasion. Training in “media literacy” or how to discern authentic from fraudulent communication especially on the web, has been a growing field for decades, and will continue to be so as technology advances. But communications techniques and evaluation of sources are less our concern here than epistemology per se, and, in particular, reliance upon trusted sources, which most people use as their criterion for recognizing truth.

The truth is out there?

What is to be done? First, let us understand that the principal constituency bearing civic responsibility for the health and welfare of public intelligence, has to be scholars and educators, including journalists; and that in these roles, our professional and technical focus must be less on the economic, technological or even psychological and moral dimensions of the epistemic (i.e. relating to knowledge) crisis than on its epistemological (i.e. the study or science of knowledge) core.

We notice that the journalistic discussions quoted above focus on trust as the main issue—i.e., whom people should or want to believe in matters of science, public policy or politics and how trustworthiness has been subverted by political, economic and technological developments. While it is probably true that this is how most people actually know and think, as scholars we  do not and, in fact, are trained not to trust even one another, because trust is an invalid and unreliable criterion of truth. From our professional perspective, public trust itself is intrinsic to the public’s epistemological crisis.

Another intrinsic element of that core obviously is inadequate factual knowledge or sheer ignorance of how and why our government works. On our watch over the past 50 years, there has been a steady erosion in the teaching of civics and history. While we spend about $50 per student annually on science and math education, only about five cents is allocated to civics education. Ten states currently have no civics requirement in schools. Large numbers of Americans cannot even name the three branches of government, never mind the value for democracy of checks and balances, or how elections are essential for peaceful transfers of power. This past year we have seen how misunderstanding of governmental politics has fed distrust, non-participation and polarization. The federal government is aware of this and has developed a purportedly high-quality K-12 civics and history program called “Educating for American Democracy,” but it has not been funded for implementation. While this initiative might help to address the knowledge issue,it does not address the crisis in epistemology—confusion about how to know and recognize truth.

Many years ago, on my first day at Brown University, the freshman class assembled in Sayles Hall to be welcomed by the university’s president, Barnaby Keeney (later the founding director of the National Endowment for the Humanities). He told us that one of the most essential and valuable skills we would learn in college—central to every scholarly discipline as the most reliable way to think about the world—was “to think on the basis of evidence.” That simple phrase—this was the first time I had heard it—blew me away, and has stuck with me for life.

Several years later, while studying history in graduate school at Columbia University, I recall discussions we often had with fellow students in one of the nation’s leading schools of journalism. They were being taught to build their stories around “balance” among various contending points of view, as a “fair” way to report to the public on current events. We history students considered this absurd, ridiculous and misleading to the public, implying that all points of view are equally valid and significant. We were right, but we see today that “balance” has set the modern standard in journalism, still practiced and still, as predicted, pernicious and dangerous. I have been amazed at how leading journalists these days struggle to articulate the challenge of ascertaining truth, treating it as discovering whom to trust. They rarely use the word “evidence”—a rare exception is Lester Holt of NBC Nightly News, who said recently in accepting the Edward R. Murrow Award for Lifetime Achievement in Journalism, “I think it’s become clearer that fairness is overrated,” and he advocated that reporters not give “unsupported arguments” equal coverage.

Follow the evidence

About the only venue where “evidence” has been determinative in current politics is our court system, wherein attempts by Trumpists to quash results of the last presidential election on grounds of corruption were summarily rejected by 63 courts at all levels nationwide for their total “lack of evidence.” The words were quoted by reporters of those decisions, and gradually the criterion of “evidence” has begun to be used comfortably by leading journalists, though we do not know if they appreciate its epistemological value—in fact, necessity in determining truth.

But the health of our democracy cannot safely rely solely on our judiciary and the best of journalism, which brings us back to the issue of our proper civic responsibilities, as scholars and teachers, for the health of public thought and discourse. What can we do to help resolve our national epistemological crisis, to protect our democracy?

First, we need to promote, for all courses and disciplines in all colleges and universities, explicitly and emphatically, that the best—i.e., surely, most reliable—way to think about the world is “on the basis of evidence.” We must work to help make it consciously automatic and habitual for all who are in or have been to college.

Second, and this is critically important, there is no reason “thinking on the basis of evidence” cannot also be taught as the explicit standard and simple lesson throughout secondary schools nationwide. We need to promote this pedagogy in every way we can, including in the media, to eliminate the apparent political divide between citizens who have been to college and those who have not. There is no justification for this particular separation in our body politic.

Third, we need to promote at every opportunity stronger academic, journalistic and media offerings in American history and civics, to combat the widespread ignorance that has also undermined our politics.

Fourth and finally, we need to promote to journalists their need to habitually ask, as the first question after hearing any political opinion or unsupported assertion, “What’s your evidence?”, and if none is forthcoming, to report that fact—that non-event as an event, that the dog didn’t bark, as it were—an integral part of their stories. This past year, it took far too long for that to happen with countless baseless assertions about the election. Journalism is a teaching profession; its responsibility is to provide the first or early accounts of current history for public use and information. Journalistic “fairness” should be to truth in public record, not to all sides of contentions in controversies.

We cannot and do not expect epistemological problems, much less crises, to be successfully resolved for all parties in any specific time frame. All I am advocating here is a concerted effort on the part of as many of us as possible to achieve a better—more constructive—balance in public discourse, between efforts to promote respect for truth, and efforts to promote partisanship with no respect for truth. I have attempted to identify the main parties responsible for truth in civic and political packaging—i.e., scholars, educators and journalists—who are all our public’s teachers. These responsible parties must work much harder to promote “thinking on the basis of evidence” rather than trusting people or institutions as a way of learning truth, on which the health of our democracy necessarily depends.

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

Christina Cliff: Teaching in the active shooter era

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

I’ve been teaching political science for about a decade now. I teach students about the international system, the functioning of government, foreign policy, national security. My teaching is based on my 12 years of higher education and shaped by my life experiences.

I’m a Cold War kid. In grade school and junior-high classrooms, we had “duck and cover” drills for what to do in the case of a Soviet attack. I grew up in a place considered a strategic attack target, so we likely did these drills more than the average American school kids. I still remember crouching under my desk, staring at the fossilized gum on the underside, waiting for the teacher to tell us the drill was over so we could go out to recess.

Even as a child I knew that we weren’t really likely to be bombed. There had never been a missile attack on the U.S. I believed in my own safety because the threat that I was told was a possibility was never a reality.

This is not to say the experience didn’t affect me. Being a Cold War kid in the U.S. meant that you knew the Soviets—and maybe China—were the enemy. Cold War kids knew that protecting us from those enemies was the primary focus of our government. We knew this because they told us. We mostly believed the politicians, because we stayed safe from the threats they told us they would combat.

When the Cold War kids grew up, some of them became educators. What we were taught, what we learned, was affected by our experiences. And when the Cold War kids grew up, some became politicians. Those childhood memories and experiences informed the way they governed. They believed that the enemies of our childhood were the enemies of our future. This belief shaped our policies, sometimes to our detriment.

We weren’t prepared for 9/11 in large part because our leaders were shaped by their experiences that said that if we would be attacked, it would be by a country. We believed, because of what we thought the Cold War had shown us, that we could deter an attack by using our threat of force or our economic influence. We did not comprehend, even though the Cold War should have taught us this as well, that you can’t deter an ideology, and that our might does not ensure our safety or victory.

A Cold War kid teaching the post-9/11 generation

I now teach classes on political violence, terrorism, international relations, and on global security and diplomacy. I’m a Cold War kid, but my students have a very different frame of reference. My students are now the post-9/11 generation—often too young to remember the actual event, though old enough to enlist in the ongoing wars that were a response to that attack. They don’t really understand why the politicians are so concerned about North Korea.

Today’s college students didn’t have my childhood, so they don’t understand the fear of a nuclear threat. What my students know, unlike the Cold War generation, is that might does not guarantee victory—and that war is endless.

What my students know, what they do remember, and what shapes their perspective, are hate crimes, terrorist attacks and mass shootings. My students know about El Paso, Dayton, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Parkland, Pulse Nightclub, Thousand Oaks, Las Vegas, Tree of Life Synagogue, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Emanuel AME Church, among so many others.

My students didn’t just duck and cover under their K-12 school desks. They learned to tie tourniquets, and have been taught how to block doors, how to stay silent in a coat closet. My students look for all of the exits at a public event, they are cautious at stores and movie theaters. They carry their phones at all times, not because they are checking their social media, but because they want to be able to reach their parents at any moment.

While they do not remember the 9/11 attacks, today’s college students do remember others. Unlike the Cold War generation, they have learned that might does not guarantee safety.

They have now also experienced more than a year of the effects of a global pandemic, which included school shutdowns, virtual learning and catastrophic death tolls. My students have seen Asian people being targeted for hate. During the pandemic, my students watched a Black man die with an officer kneeling on his neck, protests and riots erupt over police brutality. My students saw a violent insurrection storm the U.S. Capitol and kill a police officer in an effort and stop a presidential election.

Thoughts and prayers

With each shooting, with each attack, with each eruption of violence, new debates about gun control, mental illness, hate and terrorism erupt. Sometimes, our representatives enact legislation, but more often they do not. We offer prayers, we offer thoughts. But we do very little.

My students are America’s mass-shooting generation. They have learned that the potential threats may be in their hometown. They do drills in school because the threat has become reality. They didn’t wait for the recess bell to end the drill; they waited to see if it was only a drill. They didn’t stare at fossilized gum—they waited for a shadow to cross in front of the classroom closet they were hiding in.

In many ways, being a Cold War kid defined how I viewed the world and our place in it. During my childhood, the biggest threat was nuclear war that would destroy the planet. But it never happened, and I believed that our government could keep us safe. I think, I had it easier than my students do.

Many of today’s college students are growing up believing that thoughts and prayers are insincere and something that takes the place of action. They don’t believe the politicians, because the politicians haven’t kept them safe. Their generation has become used to the idea that the enemy could be anyone, that they could be anywhere, and could strike at any time.

My students are members of the active-shooter generation, and that means that I have to be prepared to address topics that they have personal experience with as they may arise in the curriculum. I have students who were at the Boston Marathon bombing, and I have students who had family and friends who survived Sandy Hook. In the classroom, I have to understand trauma in order to educate in a way that respects and acknowledges those experiences, an approach that most Cold War kids would have never expected from their teachers.

Someday, my students will be the leaders of the world. I can teach them, but their experiences will shape everything. And I have to ask, after watching the successes and failures of the Cold War kids, what will these future leaders’ policies will look like? What did the Cold War generation leave for our children?

Christina Cliff is an assistant professor of political science and security studies at Franklin Pierce University, in Rindge, N.H.

Franklin Pierce’s Mountain View apartments, with Mt. Monadnock looming in the background

— Photo by Fsguitarist

View of Mt. Monadnock from the famous Cathedral of the Pines, in Rindge

— Photo by John Phelan -

In Greater Boston, the intersection of the pandemic and immigration

Cambridge Hospital, part of the Cambridge Health Alliance

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

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

A year into the global pandemic, we are grappling with the scale of its impact and the conditions that created, permitted and exacerbated it. For those of us in the mental health field, tentative strides toward telepsychiatry pivoted to a sudden semi-permanent virtual health-care delivery system. Questions of efficacy, equity and risk management have been raised, particularly for underserved and immigrant populations. The structures of our work and its pillars (physical proximity, co-regulation, confidentiality, in-person crisis assessment) have shifted, leading to other unexpected proximities and perhaps intimacies—seeing into patients’ homes, seeing how they interact with their children, speaking with patients with their abusive partners in the room, listening to the conversation, and patients seeing into our lives.

As the pandemic crisis morphs, it is unclear if we are at the point to do meaningful reflective work, but for now, I offer some thoughts through the lens of my work at Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), an academic health-care system serving about 140,000 patients in the Boston Metro North region.

CHA is a unique system: a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, which operates the Cambridge Public Health Department and articulates as “core to the mission,” health equity and social justice to underserved, medically indigent populations with a special focus on underserved people in our communities. Within the hospital’s Department of Psychiatry, four linguistic minority mental-health teams serve Haitian, Latinx, Portuguese-speaking (including Portugal, Cape Verde and Brazil) and Asian patients.

While we endeavour to gather data on this across CHA, anecdotal evidence from the minority linguistic teams supports the existing research suggesting that immigrant and communities of color are bearing a disappropriate impact of COVID-19 in multiple intersecting and devastating ways: higher burden of disease and mortality rates, poorer care and access to care, overrepresentation in poorly reimbursed and “front-facing” vulnerable jobs such as cleaning services in hospitals and assisted care facilities, personal care attendants and home health aides, and overrepresentation in industries that have been hardest hit by the pandemic such as food service, thereby facing catastrophic loss of income.

These patients also face crowded multigenerational living conditions and unregulated and crowded work conditions. These “collapsing effects” are further exacerbated by reports from our patients that they are also being targeted by hateful rhetoric such as “the China virus” and larger anti-immigrant sentiment stoked by the Trump administration and the accompanying narrative of “economic anxiety” that has masked the racialized targeting of immigrants at their workplaces and beyond.

Telehealth. As we provide services, we have also observed that, despite privacy concerns, access to and use of our care has expanded due to the flexibility of telehealth. Patients tell us that they no longer have to take the day off from work to come to a therapy appointment and have found care more accessible and understanding of the demands of their material lives.

Some immigrant patients report that since they use phone and video applications to stay in touch with family members, using these tools for psychiatric care feels normative and familiar. For deeply traumatized individuals, despite the loss of face-to-face contact, the fact that they do not have to encounter the stresses inherent in being in contact with others out in the world has made it more possible for them to consistently engage in care with reduced fear as relates to their anxiety and/or PTSD. These are interesting observations as we try to tailor care and understand “what works for whom.”

Immigrant service providers. Another theme in the dynamics of care during the pandemic is found in the experiences of immigrant service providers whose work has been stretched in previously unrecognizable ways—and remains often invisible.

Prior to the pandemic, for example, CHA had established the Volunteer Health Advisors program, which trains respected community health workers, often individuals who were healthcare providers in their home country, who have a close understanding of the community they serve. They participate in community events such as health fairs to facilitate health education and access to services and can serve as a trusted link to health and social services and underserved communities.

What we have seen during the pandemic is even greater strain on immigrant and refugee services providers who are often the front line of contact. We have provided various “care for the caregiver” workshops that address secondary or vicarious trauma to such groups such as medical interpreters often in the position of giving grave or devastating news to families about COVID-19-related deaths as well as school liaisons and school personnel, working with children who may have lost multiple family members to the virus, often the primary breadwinners, leaving them in economic peril.

While such supportive efforts are not negligible, a public system like ours is vulnerable to operating within crisis-driven discourse and decision making. With the pandemic exacerbating inequities, organizational scholars have noted in various contexts that a state of crisis can become institutionalized. This can foreclose efforts at equity that includes both patient care as well as care for those providing it. The challenge going forward will involve keeping these issues at the forefront of decisions regarding catalyzing technology and the resulting demands on our workforce.

Diya Kallivayalil , Ph.D., is the director of training at the Victims of Violence Program at the Cambridge Health Alliance and a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

Brian Mullin/Sherelle Wu: Can colleges mandate that their employees get COVID-19 shots?

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

BOSTON

As COVID-19 cases continue to surge nationwide, the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines cannot come soon enough. Although higher- education institutions (HEIs) are not at the top of the priority list to receive scarce early doses of the vaccine, colleges and universities should prepare for how they will handle vaccination on their campuses.

In general, both public and private HEIs may mandate that their staff receive the COVID-19 vaccine once it becomes available to the general public and may discipline an employee who refuses to receive the vaccine without cause. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of a state vaccine mandate that was “necessary for the public health or the public safety” (Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11 (1905)) as well as the exclusion of students from both public and private schools due to refusal to receive a mandatory vaccine (Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174 (1922)).

Under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), employers have an obligation to provide a safe workplace free from serious recognized hazards and should do their part to encourage compliance with governmental health and safety guidelines.

In practice, however, HEIs should be aware that staff may be entitled to medical exemptions under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and religious exemptions under Title VII. Institutions should have a uniform policy for staff to apply for such exemptions.

When an employee requests an exemption, both Title VII and the ADA require that the institution engage in an interactive process to determine effective accommodations or alternatives to vaccination specific to that employee. Such accommodations may include permitting the employee to work remotely; temporarily reassigning the employee to a different, less public-facing position or workstation; or allowing the employee to take a temporary leave of absence.

In certain circumstances, if the exemption poses an “undue hardship” to the employer, the HEI may deny the exemption and require that the employee receive the vaccination. An undue hardship under Title VII is defined as a minimal cost or burden to the employer’s operations. This will vary depending on the size and nature of the HEI, but can be any economic or noneconomic expense that would create a burden on its operation such as, for example, changes to schedules that increase payroll expenses or result in other employees working less desirable shifts. In comparison, an undue hardship under the ADA requires an HEI to show a “significant difficulty or expense,” a much higher standard to meet.

Under both statutes, consideration of an undue hardship includes both financial costs as well as cultural or operational costs such as whether the accommodation would compromise the integrity of a seniority system—for example, an HEI that has a collective-bargaining agreement which provides for seniority for bidding for positions. Relevant factors in considering an undue hardship in the vaccination context would include, the risk to the public due to noncompliance; the availability of an alternate means of infection control such as personal protective equipment (PPE); and the number of employees who actually request an accommodation.

While an employee’s refusal or inability to receive the vaccination may cause jealousy or friction between coworkers, such a conflict would not constitute an undue hardship unless the accommodation would infringe on the coworkers’ rights or ability to perform their duties in a safe way.

In deciding whether to mandate (rather than strongly encourage) staff COVID-19 vaccination, each college or university should carefully consider its own community needs and circumstances. For example, a medical or nursing school that employs certain staff in health-care facilities may have a much more compelling need to mandate vaccinations than an institution whose employees continue to operate on a mostly remote or hybrid basis. As the vaccination rollout varies widely from state to state, institutions should consult their own state’s laws and narrowly tailor their own vaccine policy to match their local public-health agency’s guidance.

HEIs considering mandatory vaccines should maintain an objective written policy based on business necessity (i.e. actual job requirements) and apply the policy consistently. The institution can narrowly tailor the mandate to apply only to specific departments or positions. For example, an institution could mandate vaccination only for public-facing staff positions which are required to perform work on-campus rather than positions that may be performed remotely. The HEI should educate their employees on the benefits of vaccination and the process to request an accommodation.

An institution that has decided to require compulsory COVID-19 vaccination should provide free and convenient vaccine administration to its employees and should ensure that staff can take the necessary time off from work to receive the vaccine and recover from any side effects if necessary.

Importantly, given the need to carefully track vaccine administration to ensure individuals receive both doses at the appropriate time, colleges and universities must be careful to safeguard the privacy of employees’ medical information, including keeping it separate from personnel files.

Since the currently available COVID-19 vaccines are approved on an emergency-use basis, HEIs should carefully watch any changes in approval, efficacy and best practices. For example, pregnant women were not included in the clinical trials and may be excluded from initial vaccine administration. Institutions should also look out for additional guidance from the Centers for Disease Control, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or  OSHA.

Brian Mullin and Sherelle Wu are lawyers practicing in the Employment & Higher Education Groups in the Boston law firm of Bowditch & Dewey LLP.