Letters from Academia

Last week I wrote in this column about the issue of the increasing gap between administrators (mainly presidents) and the faculty. This is an issue that has been going on for decades and does not seem to be resolving by itself. How many institutions of higher education can succeed when their leaders are seen as “missing in action” because they seem to be out of touch with reality?

Presidents of institutions of higher education have been the focus of numerous books, yet their roles are not well understood. That is the result of the sheer number of colleges and universities together with their diversity. According to the Carnegie Foundation, there are more than 4,600 schools grouped into 33 categories. To that add the different nomenclature for the leadership position that includes – but is not limited to – president, chancellor, rector, and the like, which can lead to tremendous confusion. Some systems such as SUNY (State University of New York), where the top executive is called chancellor, have campus presidents reporting to him/her. In the University of California system the CEO is called president and the top campus executives are called chancellors.

On top of that, the authority vested in presidents varies from very broad with loose reporting to a Board of Trustees (BOT) – whose names also vary such as regents or visitors – to being just executers of the policies designed by the head of the system or by a member of a BOT.

Most presidents give the appearance of being the public face of their institution for ceremonial functions, while most people have little understanding of what they actually do beyond showing up at public events. They are vaguely seen as the top fundraising and public relations person of the institution unless there is a major crisis or scandal, at which time people look to the president for answers. And when that happens they seem to respond by following the advice of their public relations people rather than giving an authentic and sincere reaction. And if they are fired or forced to resign, it is usually under confidential agreements that leave little room for comprehending the reasons behind that incident.

Part of the problem is that, with some notable exceptions, most college presidents today are seen as people who had a short (and sometimes not very brilliant) careers as scholars and who have spent most of their profession climbing the administrative ladder. Even worse, there are and have been college presidents who have no academic pedigree and who have come directly either from industry or from government with zero experience in higher education.

Sometimes it seems that BOTs are oblivious to how important it is for faculty members that college leaders have strong academic credentials. Despite the fact that many trustees are business people, they don’t remember that if you name as CEO of a corporation someone without a business background, that that will have an ill effect on the morale of staff. People will think that the new CEO is either phony of just a puppet of the board of directors.

What do faculty members feel about academically un-engaged presidents? Not very much. For one thing, presidents tend to talk more and more about budgetary difficulties and the need to cut costs. It makes people nervous when the average college budget is made up of more than 90 percent personnel costs. Presidents also love to talk about things such as rankings (most of them meaningless when it comes to the effectiveness of the institution in terms of students learning outcomes) or athletics. And, for the most part, faculty don’t really care about those things.

Also, presidents rarely attend major academic lectures, or only show up for conferences to give the opening remarks. In other words, they don’t appear interested on what really matters to the faculty: academics.

There was a time when college presidents had a strong scholarship pedigree. Take the example of David Starr Jordan. Born in 1851, he turned out to be not only one of the most outstanding zoologists in American history, but also went on to become president of Indiana University and later the founding president of Stanford University. Or consider the case of David Baltimore, who was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and later became president of the California Institute of Technology and president of Rockefeller University. Neither of these people were perfect presidents, but you don’t have to be the preeminent scholar in your field, or won a Nobel Prize, to have the respect of the faculty.

What you need is to show genuine interest in faculty work in particular, and academics in general. You may think that the obligations of the president are too demanding to spend time attending lectures or having in-depth academic discussions with faculty, but if one knows how to manage time, it can be done.

For example, you don’t have to be on time for every important academic speech, but being a little late is better than leaving in the middle. Also try to personally congratulate faculty for their achievements. Most times a brief, but sincere, email will do. You can say the same thing about authenticity. Carefully crafted communications using the language typical of marketing departments will look artificial. If you think you need to convey a message, put yourself in the shoes of the faculty. Be authentic and transparent and if you make a mistake, recognize it.

We need leaders who are genuine, not cartoonish.

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Making College Presidents More Visible

Conflicts between faculty and administrators are not uncommon. In some cases, they escalate to the point in which faculty cast a vote of “no confidence,” usually against the president or chancellor of the institution. This action places the boards of trustees in the difficult position of either publicly backing or firing the chief executive officer of the college. But why does this happen?

To understand these conflicts, we must take a look of how the role of the president in American universities has evolved over time.

The first colleges and universities in Colonial America were under the strict control of the governing boards that selected their presidents. Those presidents, in turn, reported to those governing boards with little regard of what the faculty might have thought. This lack of accountability towards the internal constituencies also allowed campus CEOs not to be expected to perform at a very high level as long as they kept the boards happy.

Because of this system, presidents spent a lot of time getting involved in politicking, not only with the board itself but also with other members of the community who were affiliates of the same elite groups as those of the boards. The need for raising financial support – just as today – was also a major reason to get involved in those issues. By keeping the board and other influential people pleased, some institution leaders were astute enough to get appointed for life for all practical purposes.

flourish, particularly in rural areas. Presidents began to emphasize their public service by demonstrating their utility and accountability and how much they contributed to the local or state economies.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the profile of college presidents had changed. Transformations such as the need to increase recruitment make curricular offerings more appealing, and the necessity to fundraise required presidents to be more focused on external issues than on the day-to-day management of the institution. This led to them being sought out as leading members of their community involved not only in local, state, or even national affairs. Presidents started to serve on boards of other institutions. Their involvement in campus construction projects also became more intense, as the facilities needs were bigger and more expensive and the fact that such projects provided with excellent “naming” opportunities for donors.

Another phenomenon that influenced the changing roles of a campus leader was the appearance between the 1890s and the 1920s of alumni groups. These groups were gaining prominence when becoming targets of fundraising efforts and many of them began to occupy positions of power, particularly at the state level or in the corporate world. As consequence, presidents started to pay more attention to nonacademic experiences of students, such as athletics and other amenities, which in turn generated more dissatisfaction among faculty who saw that emphasis on these efforts and the subsequent redistribution of financial resources as contrary to academic traditions. By the same token the figure of the provost or vice president of academic affairs became reinforced because college presidents were no longer preoccupied with the day-to-day management of academic issues.

By the 1930s a number of state universities transformed themselves from one campus to multi-campus institutions. They also became more diverse in terms of academic commitments, initiating the process of becoming multi-purpose and comprehensive.

This growth in size and complexity drew university presidents even further away from what was their initial academic core and required them to be savvier business people, beginning the trend that has come to be known as the “corporatization of higher education,” particularly among public institutions. Universities started to compete for prestige, and for the relatively new state universities the fastest way to do so was to attract talent with great name recognition. To that end, they began to offer “start-up” packages to new and transferring faculty (particularly in the sciences) while “stealing” faculty who felt under-appreciated at their home institutions. They also developed non-profit branches in the form of foundations, which would enhance the flow of donations to the university while creating a managerial side for those operations.

During and after World War II, a number of events changed the demographics of American universities and their leadership and managerial challenges. First, the G.I. Bill of 1944 meant that the demand for higher education increased dramatically. Second, the “Sputnik shock” of 1957 meant that the federal government started to provide much more funding to higher education, particularly in the sciences.

Third, college sports became bigger and virtually professionalized with the help of the media (especially TV) which, in turn, created the illusion that such programs could generate more revenues while, in reality, very few are even self-sufficient. Fourth, the distinctive nature of medical, law and business schools, whose faculty could earn more money in the private sector, inflated salaries in those areas of universities while salaries stagnated in others. Fifth, the explosive growth in for-profit colleges took advantage of federal financial aid to students to lure students away from traditional institutions. All these factors pushed comprehensive universities away from a traditional definition of what an institution of higher education was and created new demands upon their leadership.

Consequently, their leaders needed to be more business-like (and in the case of public universities, more politically connected). The response was that these universities began to fill their ranks at the top with people who had had little if any academic experience. This, in turn, made the figure of the president even more divorced from the academic mission of the institution and even more isolated from the faculty. In the final analysis, the physical and intellectual distance between faculty and administrators grew larger and the chances for miscommunication even more insurmountable, which has led to the nickname of “M.I.A.”, or missing in action, for many of them.

The solution? To be continued.

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The Gap Between Faculty, Presidents

There is a ghost wandering countries, societies, and even the halls of academia. It is the ghost of tribalism and that ghost is as old as the dawn of the human species.

One of the defining characteristics of people around the world, is to group ourselves for our own benefit. Since before any civilization could be described as such, we bound together to defend ourselves from other humans, for cooperating to seek food, to build our shelters, and many more things. That is why we fought wars, conquered territories, subjugate others, and developed characteristics that define ourselves based on physical appearance, behaviors, and beliefs. That is why we developed a well-defined language to communicate, dressed in certain ways, and unified behind a particular set of religious beliefs or political systems.

As more efficient means of transportation and communication allowed us to see what other tribes were doing, in some cases we tried to exchange resources or entered into conflicts with them for the same resources. Totalitarian states knew very well that if you wanted to be a larger and fiercer nation (a tribe of larger dimensions) you needed to unified the members of that group behind an ideology; by force if necessary. That is why the Soviet system, Nazism, all forms of fascism, and North Korea have done what they did or do.

With the advent of the concept of globalization epitomized by the development of Internet, many thought that tribalism was going to die. That was, at least, what the Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan predicted in his 1962 book “The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man” in which he metaphorically saw a shrinking of the world into a village thanks to the tools of telecommunications. That is what he called a “global village.”

Now the world is seeing a global movement in the opposite direction. The dream of an European Union is being shattered by Eurosceptic drives within many countries from Britain to central and eastern Europe. European countries are also seeing tribalism with nationalist movements trying to break apart their own countries. The more recent example is Catalonia, in Spain, whose independence movement is being led by an unlikely amalgamation of center-right, leftists, anti-capitalist and neo-anarchist tribes of their own, all united behind the idea that Catalonia should be its own tribe, separated from the tribe of Spain. They even fight among themselves on whether they should belong to the tribe of Europe or not.

Academia has been also the victim of its own tribalism. It was born as a trade group in Medieval Europe and endowed itself with its own tribal codes such as tenure. They have remained –for the most part- insensitive to societal changes, to fluctuations in demography, and shifts on how they are being seen by public opinion. They have also internalized their own differences in the form of sub-tribes: disciplines, tenured or tenure-track vs. non-tenured track faculty, males vs. females, Ivy-league types vs. those who do not have that kind of pedigree, and we could go on and on.

Political differences and external money have also sow some of those differences, leading to intolerance toward ideas (even slightly different) by others, to bigotry, to violence. And that is why we need to examine what tribalism is all about.

Tribalism makes us irrational and that has consequences: intolerance, hatred, wars. It makes us shield bad guys by assuming that they need to be protected no matter what because they belong to our tribe, which can be summarized by the aphorism “He may be a jerk, but he is our jerk.”

What is more concerning is that in higher education we are in a position of great responsibility. For those of us who have seriously meditated about how we influence the behavior of students. We know that they may not listen to what we say, but they are certainly watching us both in and outside the classroom.

If we continue to display tribal behavior, those students will consider that as “the new normal,” that it is ok to adhere to only one way of thinking, that it is very comfortable to get the news only from the sources with which we already ideologically agree. That if we hear contrarian voices we should either ignore them or, even worse, shouting them down, as evidenced by many recent incident on campuses. The idea of debating ideas in a civilized and well-informed fashion, is over. Even when discussing matters, we tend to shout or just voice falsehoods, misleading statements, or twisted half-truths, knowing very well that what we are doing is wrong.

After all, why not? Our political leaders lie without remorse. Their supporters tolerate not only their lies but also their unethical behavior, and when confronted with the facts, those supporters come up with even more lies to justify the unjustifiable.

Unless more of us in academia thrive to become moral leaders by example, we will be failing in one of our most relevant obligations in our profession. Whether we like it or not we are examples for future generations. Tribalism and its allies are not the kind of legacies that we should leave after spending decades and decades in classroom, labs, studios, of field sites.

Students can learn the material facts of the subjects by reading the textbook, but it is up to us the provide moral guidance, not for indoctrination purposes but as lighthouses that deliver advice and help to avoid wreckages in life. Can we do it? It is entirely up to us, but it will be a tall order.

As I once heard the late Spanish Nobel Prize Winner Severo Ochoa say, “Men may have landed on the moon, but we keep the same morals of the primates from whom we descended.” Think about it.

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Tribalism is Consuming the World

After decades of a culture of social isolationism, we see how colleges and universities have gradually become the battlegrounds of national issues such as race, religion, sexual assault, gun control and free speech. Over the last 50 years more than 120 cases related in one way or another to higher education have been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hundreds of other cases have been filed, only for the justices to deny hearing them.

However, most colleges and universities are not well prepared to deal with litigation. For one thing institutions of higher education have had for decades a culture of what we can call “academic exceptionalism,” in which they believe that they are governed by a different set of rules that allow them to do virtually anything they want.

Sometimes this culture of exceptionalism extends to the upper administration. For example, many times one hears from public university lawyers that their institutions are largely protected from legal action by “sovereign immunity,” a legal doctrine by which the sovereign or state cannot commit a legal wrong and is immune from civil suit or criminal prosecution. Without ignoring that doctrine, the Supreme Court and lower courts have decided on more than one occasion that such protection is not absolute.

Another myth among faculty members is the unconditional belief in the concept of academic freedom. Again and again, the Supreme Court has established that such a concept, far from absolute, is rather limited. What the justices have said is that all that faculty members are vested with is in the establishment and the enforcement of standards of behavior that are reasonably and appropriately applied in evaluations of performance in and outside the classroom.

Although we have heard of many cases where the plaintiffs are students, the fact of the matter is that they represent only 15 percent of the cases argued before the Supreme Court. Faculty members bring about a third of all the cases. The reason so few legal complaints by students are heard by the Court is because the justices have again and again reaffirmed the fact that colleges and universities have a broad authority over students’ lives and affairs, keeping them under tight institutional control. This is an important point that counters a notion that in some circles has become a fad, and that is that students are “customers” and should be treated as such.

Further, despite the fact that we believe that all people have the same protection under the law, the Supreme Court has decided that rights for students in private institutions are fewer that those in public ones. All of the above leads to a number of conclusions. One is that, against popular belief, the law is highly contextual and cases dealing with a variety of other subject matter will oftentimes have bearing on higher education law.

These days we see two different approaches by lawyers in higher education. On one hand, we find those who feel that they really work for the university and report to the higher ups by trying to implement the desires of the higher administration to better serve the university. That means being supportive in enforcing rules and regulations against people who do harm (whether faculty, staff, students, or external agents). In many cases, they help to find ways to discipline people so their actions are not detrimental to the name and proper functioning of the institution.

The other approach by some lawyers is to be hypersensitive to any and all potential lawsuits and take the most conservative approach to governance and management of the institution, (i.e., attempt to placate all people who threaten legal action). While there are times to adopt a more conciliatory strategy even when the institution is correct, when used continuously by some lawyers it harms the institution in many ways. The fact is that there is well-established law in certain areas of the operation of an institution, and the odds of losing these potential lawsuits is nil.

One threat that is thrown out often is that of students suing the university because of grades. Except in very extreme cases, a good lawyer advises the campus CEO not to feel intimidated by such actions because of two basic things: (1) increasingly courts tend to dismiss such cases (as long as the institution has followed proper procedures) for considering them frivolous lawsuits; and (2) the plaintiffs’ lawyers charge by the hour while the university ones charge by the year, meaning that although in many cases the plaintiffs’ attorneys either are too expensive to their clients, or they just bet on the possibility of recovering a fee thinking that universities have “deep pockets.”

Despite all this, some in higher administration have started to listen too much to these so-called “scary cat” lawyers. As a consequence, we are seeing faculty formally complaining of the evaluations given by their chairs (i.e., their immediate supervisors) about their productivity and quality in their teaching, scholarly work, and service to the university and their profession. What is worse, in some cases, it is the upper administration itself encouraging the filing of grievances, with the support of the university lawyers, in order to be in good graces with the trouble makers of the institution.

Although the need for lawyers in colleges and universities is evident because of the kind of society we live in, those lawyers work for the university or college, not the other way around. That means that the university administrators need not only to listen to them, but also instruct them to provide support for the university mission, policies and practices. Otherwise the institutions become paralyzed and hostage to individuals whose intentions are not the best for higher education.

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Lawyers have Two Approaches to Higher Education

According to The Institute for Civility in Government, civility is “about more than just politeness, although politeness is a necessary first step. It is about disagreeing without disrespect, seeking common ground as a starting point for dialogue about differences, listening past one’s preconceptions, and teaching others to do the same.”

If we go by current events in academia it seems that civility has all but been lost. We see students actively impeding or shouting out at outside speakers just because those guests do not adhere to a particular “party line,” a pure version of a particular ideology, or are not always considered “politically correct” enough. We also see some speakers coming to campuses whose main motivation seems to be to provoke in order to generate headlines or sell their latest books. Physical confrontations are not uncommon in these circumstances. Other times we hear students saluting each other in public by using lewd language or using hate or vulgar language as it they were part of the normal vocabulary.

Sometimes civility vanishes behind the scenes even among adults who should know better, like when sometimes faculty loudly confront administrators with made-up or exaggerated accusations at public meetings. Pushing and shoving in athletic facilities of campuses during competitions is also becoming more and more frequent.

And, of course, bad manners seem to proliferate through the use of social media. Postings by both faculty and students using offensive language or just calling for the killing of this or that person have also become quite frequent and have attracted press attention.

And it is not just words that can hurt. In more extreme cases, we have seen how some confrontations include firearms – with sometimes-deadly consequences. Such was the instance of the 2010 shooting during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama when professor Amy Bishop – after being denied tenure – killed three colleagues and injured three others with a 9-millimeter handgun.

When others criticize many of these behaviors, we hear reactions such as “this is protected by the First Amendment,” or that carrying a weapon on campus is fine because of the Second Amendment. Of course, these arguments are used by people from both sides of the political spectrum to justify their actions.

From a legal standpoint, these are not straightforward issues. Although some will argue that you can use the 1942 case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, in which the U.S. Supreme Court limited free speech by concluding that the use of “fighting words” is not protected by the First Amendment. However, since then other courts have taken a narrower view of that conclusion, limiting free speech only in cases where the words represent a real threat or incitement of physical violence.

Most campuses have come up with speech codes, especially in the use of the Internet or at public events. But when challenged in courts, institutions of higher education almost always lose because the courts see those codes as an attempt to limit free speech. Others have come up with what they call “civility training,” like in the 2008 case of Johns Hopkins University, which tried to make all members of the university community take mandatory instruction in manners. There was, not surprisingly, a strong pushback from the faculty because of the vagueness of the concept.

Some institutions have codified what they call “collegiality” among the standards measured for getting tenure and/or promotion. The problem is that this is another vague term that can mean many different things to many different people. For example, you can have a faculty member that does not seem to be particularly gregarious or extroverted, but happens to be both an effective teacher and productive scholar. Another may be a very nice and popular person, but a mediocre professor at best. Which person should be granted tenure?

The only thing we can agree on is that widespread civility on campuses is no longer part of the norm. So, what has happened?

For one, we have a nation as polarized as we were before the Civil War. The media have fueled many people’s minds with false stories (regardless of their ideological inclinations). Their audiences only listen (or read) the media they agree with ideologically. Critical thinking seems to be an after-thought for many people. And our political establishment is, for the most part, trying to take advantage of these divisions.

There was a time when colleges and universities were a model of civil discussion, where the facts were laid out and used to illustrate different perspectives, where debates were part of the teaching process, where students were encouraged to defend a position different than their own so to put themselves in another’s shoes. There was a time when people accepted that nobody has a monopoly on the truth.

We keep insisting that higher education is the cradle of future leaders. If we really believe that, then we better get our act together. And changes have to start at the top. There is nothing more persuasive than college leaders demonstrating by their own example that they are open minded, tolerant and humble. They need to demonstrate that they are running the shop with transparency and effectiveness, and creating the conditions that promote civility on campus despite the loud shouts from others.

We constantly hear the importance of promoting diversity on campuses, but that diversity should not be confined to racial, ethnic, or gender groups. It should also include intellectual diversity. But for that idea to prosper we need to reinstall civility in our debates. And civility is not something that you can impose by edict, but by example.

As the English writer, Mary Wortley Montagu once said, “Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.” Think about it.

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Civility needs to return to higher education

Higher education is being attacked for many things from many different quarters. From the political spectrum, we hear things that colleges and universities are “too liberal” or teach “useless things.” Those perceptions, paired with increasing calls for accountability, have generated a series of both federal and state laws calling for more oversight of the operations of these institutions, ranging from where students sleep when going off campus on university business to how to assign textbooks to students.

This increased oversight, in turn, has created more administrative burden on colleges and universities, requiring them to spend more time, effort, and money on regulatory issues rather than on their main business: education. This has resulted in an increasingly large and complex administrative structures that faculty see, with suspicion, as “administrative bloat.” This creates sort of an unexpected alliance between those who are unsympathetic toward higher education (some politicians) and those who would be the most affected by outside interference (faculty).

Both bodies seem to ignore a number of things. First, legal mandates by federal and state bodies are largely unfunded, as the federal and state governments never give additional moneys to handle these new requirements. Instead, money must be pulled from other areas, such as teaching, which increases the pressure on institutions to offer larger (and more pedagogically ineffective) classes.

From faculty members, we hear that colleges and universities keep increasing their administrative staff in detriment to its academic mission. Although that is true in a few cases, the fact of the matter is that because of both increases in federal and state regulations, institutions of higher education have had to hire more administrators to comply with those regulations. In fact, as mentioned in an earlier article of this column, dozens of presidents of colleges and universities complained to the federal government about the cost of complying with their regulations, which could be as high as 15 percent of their budgets, and that’s only for federal mandates. When it comes to state regulations, the presidents of public institutions have been much more circumspect in order to avoid rattling the political structures in their own states.

Now a document titled “How much is too much,” recently produced by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, sheds some insight into this problem and provides some important recommendations. We need to frame their efforts by remaining mindful that the major concern of this organization is not political or faculty criticism, but the fact that the cost of going to college keeps increasing. Their goal is to make the college experience as cost-effective as possible.

One of the recommendations of the report is that everybody within the institution should be made more aware of the data when it comes to items such as faculty/administrative personnel ratio, and how those numbers compare with similar institutions nationwide. And those comparisons have to be meaningful. You cannot compare those ratios between a small, private liberal arts college and a large public one. The size of the operations of the former – having smaller student-faculty ratios – is always going to be smaller because of the larger proportion of faculty at big state schools.

Also, whether the institution is more focused on research or in teaching changes the number of staff required to manage the complex jungle of regulations imposed by the federal government. And they will have to provide faculty with more “release time” for research, which means that the tenure track faculty will be teaching fewer courses.

Costs for maintaining expensive athletic programs such as football or basketball is also a factor. It is well known that many coaches at universities with prestigious athletic programs earn million-dollar salaries. However, we can argue that those sport programs contribute very little, if any, to the quality of the education provided to students.

The main recommendations of this report are several. One is that boards of trustees must be knowledgeable about administrative spending by asking their chief financial officer to report the institution’s administrative/instructional cost ratio for the most recent fiscal year. If, for example, the institution’s ratio is higher than the median ratio for schools of similar undergraduate enrollments, the board should ask why that is the case.

Another recommendation is to create a financial dashboard for determining cost-effectiveness indicators to evaluate when boards are asked to sign off on major expenditures. That should include space utilization before authorizing new buildings, and number of students in each degree program before approving new ones. This is important because some academic programs with very small enrollments survive as “zombies” just because they are in the books. And all the while we keep hiring faculty to teach in those programs.

Another recommendation is to increase transparency so everybody is well informed about expenditures and their justifications. To that end it is very important to separate what expenses are really related to the mission of the institution versus non-essential tasks. That would maintain the priorities of the institution front and center, while avoiding external and internal criticisms.

In addition to all this we need to remember the very concept of shared governance that is being applied in higher education. Shared governance means shared responsibilities. It is not a political label. What it means is that faculty members need to take more responsibility for the operations of the institution that will allow them to better understand the inner workings of these complex institutions while providing sensible advice – not just criticism – to the purely administrative personnel.

Something that baffles many of us in higher education is how little most faculty members understand about how their colleges and universities work, which leads to misunderstandings and frictions. That is why we should offer more opportunities for faculty to participate in the administration of our institutions.

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Administrative Costs of Colleges Can Be Controlled

The fight for civil rights in this country has a long history. It became particularly notable in the 1960s with the passage of The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Yet, such a law did not include any prohibition against gender discrimination in public education and federally assisted programs. After some legislative battles, Indiana Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh proposed in 1971 a provision that would eventually become Title IX within the Higher Education Act of 1965 and was signed into law by President Nixon in 1972.

In the words of Bayh, this provision would provide “an equal chance (for women) to attend the schools of their choice, to develop the skills they want, and to apply those skills with the knowledge that they will have a fair chance to secure the jobs of their choice with equal pay for equal work.”

This legislation was used by the Obama Administration to investigate an increasing number of cases of sexual assaults on campuses. By 2014 nearly a hundred colleges and universities were under investigation for cases that ranged from sexual harassment to sexual assault.

Because the way these cases were being poorly handled by many institutions of higher education, the Department of Education issued as series of guidelines during the Obama Administration aimed at making colleges take allegations of sexual assault more seriously by demanding the lowest standard of proof, “preponderance of evidence,” in deciding whether a student is responsible for sexual assault. The reason for that was that many institutions of higher education receiving federal funds were found to be biased against women who sometimes were depicted as the one “provoking” the sexual assaults, including the widespread use of certain drugs at campus parties that made females to lose conscience become easier targets of sexual assault.

Last Friday Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos scrapped a key part of government policy on campus sexual assault, saying she was giving colleges more freedom to balance the rights of accused students with the need to crack down on serious misconduct. She said that the new standard would be “clear and convincing evidence.”

This was in fulfillment of the only specific promise made in the Republican platform in that last election cycle regarding higher education. This new policy has been heralded by conservative groups as a major victory.

Despite the announcement by DeVos, the change of standards is not mandated, so colleges and universities can continue to use old standards. Further, almost 50 percent of the states have enacted laws that effectively mirror the standards recommended by the Obama Administration.

Women’s and legal groups have already condemned changes in policy by arguing that it will discourage students from reporting assaults and will create uncertainty for schools on how to follow the law, making campuses less safe.

The problem with these cases is that they are a matter of “he-said, she-said,” so there is rarely hard evidence one way or another. Under the Obama interpretation of the law, the “preponderance” rule means colleges must find a student responsible if it is more likely than not that the student conducted a sexual act without the partner’s consent. Also, the definition of “clear and convincing” case meant that it was highly probable the misconduct occurred. Add to that the fact that many sexual assaults on campuses involve the use of alcohol and drugs and no witnesses.

Other effects of the change of policy by DeVos is that she eliminated a requirement that investigations be completed in 60 days, suggesting now that the investigation should be concluded “reasonably prompt.” The department will also allow mediation – sessions in which an accuser and accused hash out their differences – if both sides agree. Mediation was not permitted under the Obama administration guidelines, in the belief that women would feel pressure to participate and confront alleged offenders.

This approval of mediation will create a slippery slope, leaving schools giving the thrust of the resolution of the case to others while maintaining secrecy of the outcome. Colleges and universities, for the most part, tend to be very secretive about these issues out of fear of bad publicity. This new rule will only enable even less public scrutiny.

But make no mistake about it, sexual assaults in colleges and universities are a widespread problem with more than 350 cases currently investigated by federal officials. Anyone well-informed about sexual assault statistics know that they represent only a small fraction of the number of actual cases, mostly because many women feel “shame’ that prevents them from coming forward with their complaints. Further, there have been numerous complaints by women who feel that their schools have not appropriately handled their accusations.

For those of us who have been involved in higher education for many years, we all know that our institutions do not always handle well these types of accusations, nor do we create a climate of intolerance toward this kind of conduct. All you need to know to be convinced about the seriousness and magnitude of this problem is the read the news, particularly the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, where these kinds of incidents – and the scholarly studies about them – are commonly reported.

It is time for colleges and universities to change the climate about sexual assault on campuses by establishing rules that diminish the chances for incidents to occur, for everybody to see that the administration will act decisively and fairly to all complaints, and that they will be completely transparent about the handling of all cases. After all, more than half of the higher education population in this country is women whose rights must be protected.

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What Changes to Title IX Mean to Higher Education

The problem of college students with mental health issues is not new, but the ramifications of this oftentimes hidden issue is becoming more and more acute for those of us who work on campuses. And while there hasn’t been a major violent situation lately – such as the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre – we all sense that mental health issues represent a ticking bomb at the nation’s colleges and universities.

The National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency headquartered in Washington, D.C., has just released a report titled “Mental Health on College Campuses: Investments, Accommodations Needed to Address Student Needs.” The report constitutes an immediate call to action.

This report does not reveal anything new. Its premises are well known.

The percentage of college students seeking support for mental health issues at all levels is increasing, and that most campuses are not responding appropriately to their needs. This lack of resources impacts students’ ability to succeed in college. Students with problems such as stress, substance abuse, eating disorders, and suicidal ideation “continue to face barriers to accessing counseling services on campus and in receiving disability-related accommodations that are necessary to help them participate in their education on an equal footing with students without disabilities,” according to the report, which calls for major reforms in both institutional policies and practices, and in federal laws and policies.

The NCD report is based on research conducted by interviewing numerous social science researchers, advocates, college administrators, college policymakers, college legal counsels, disability specialists and mental health service providers. It lays out a series of recommendations to Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, as well as directly to institutions of higher education. More faculty, staff, and administrators, according to the report, need training in identifying and supporting students with mental health issues, while making sure that colleges provide disability-related modifications and accommodations as required under federal disability laws. Lack of resources for students seems to be particularly acute in the case of community colleges in rural areas, the study found.

The recommendations made by the NCD include, but are not limited to, asking Congress to provide more funding for mental health and substance abuse disorder services on campuses, money to assist colleges in meeting the increased need for mental health services and support for students, as well as increasing funding for suicide prevention programs. The NCD calls for the government to provide this funding assistance “contingent on those colleges implementing a mental health program, just as federal law makes federal financial assistance available contingent on a college’s implementation of a program to prevent student use/abuse of illicit drugs and alcohol.”

The report also recommends Congress substantially increase Pell Grants to provide opportunities to students with disabilities who are disproportionately low-income, to amend the Higher Education Act to extend the length of time a student with a disability is eligible for federal financial aid and to allow students whose disabilities cause them to require additional semesters of financial aid to retain their eligibility for Pell Grants beyond 12 semesters.

Among the recommendations to the U.S. Department of Education are to provide colleges with best practices for responding to students who exhibit or threaten self-harming behavior, to provide colleges with best practices for offering legally required modifications and accommodations for students with mental health disabilities, to modify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to allow students to directly input disability-related expenses, and to clarify to colleges that student support services funding can be used to provide mental health counseling services.

The NCD also recommends the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to take actions to increase the awareness at colleges about mental health grant funding opportunities, including funds available under the 21st Century Cures Act, a law passed by Congress in 2016 that authorized over $6 billion in health-related funding.

These and many other recommendations in the report are timely and sound, but will they be heard? Most likely not. With a Congress, an administration, and the media fully distracted in ideological battles about healthcare, Russia-related news, and budgetary issues, the NCD report will most likely be ignored until the next Virginia Tech type of incident – a tragedy that resulted in the killing of 32 people and the wounding of 17 others.

Then we’ll see policy makers rushing to make grandiose statements while not mentioning that the responsibility of preventing these kinds of tragedies was theirs in the first place. The same can be said of federal agencies which lack the nerve to implement the law or to come up with actions that require vision, particularly because many of them have vacant positions yet to be filled caused by the lack of action by the current administration.

Lastly, but equally important, we need better leadership at the college level that shows a genuine interest in dealing with this issue by seeking external funding and redirecting internal funding to provide the necessary services to students dealing with mental health issues. Many administrators at colleges and universities are focused on solving budgetary issues caused by diminishing financial support from their states, or are distracted trying to make their boards of trustees happy by increasing the prominence of their institutions in meaningless and unscientific rankings. Sadly, do not expect U.S. News and World Report or others to publish rankings about “Colleges that do Best in Addressing Mental Health Issues” anytime soon.

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Mental Health on Campuses also Require More Attention

Online courses have become very popular – and very controversial – for many reasons. In the fall of 2014 there were 5.8 million students taking online courses, with 2.85 million taking all of their courses online. Originally being offered by for-profit institutions, now a number of public colleges and universities are offering them under a number of premises, such as making higher education more accessible, the belief that offering on-line courses is cheaper than in person and that they provide an easier way to learn.

Yet, it has been the common wisdom that students consistently perform worse in an online setting than they do in face-to-face classrooms and that taking online courses increases their likelihood of dropping out and overall impedes their progress through college. So has online education fulfilled its original promises?

In a study published last June by the Brookings Institute (a non-partisan think-tank based in Washington, D.C.), the authors concluded that online higher education is a mixed bag. The study, titled “Promises and pitfalls of online education,” the researchers found, among other things, that “in their current design, online courses are difficult, especially for the students who are least prepared. These students’ learning and persistence outcomes are worse when they take online courses than they would have been had these same students taken in-person courses.” Yet, they believe that “continued improvement of online curricula and instruction can strengthen the quality of these courses and hence the educational opportunities for the most in-need populations.”

One basic problem in the design of online courses is that their creators assume that all students have the same preparation and skills and will all succeed just by putting in enough time and effort. However, we all know that every student is different. Further, those who are first-generation college students, those who live in rural areas, or who come from deficient high schools usually do worse than students coming from more advantageous backgrounds.

To try to clarify these issues, the researchers used data from DeVry University, a for-profit college with an undergraduate enrollment of more than 100,000 students nationwide. DeVry’s students, on average, take two-thirds of their courses online, which means that they could make meaningful comparisons with the rest of their students who take courses in conventional in-person classes. Further, their online and in-person sections are identical in most ways with many professors teaching both versions.

Some of the results of their research were that taking a course online reduces student grades by 0.44 points on the traditional four-point grading scale. Students taking the course in-person earned roughly a B- grade on average, while those taking it online earned a C, providing evidence that students learned less in the online setting.

They also found that taking a course online increases the probability that a student will drop out of school by 9 percent. As expected, the negative effects of online courses are concentrated in the lowest performing students. Low performing students who take online classes have grades reduced by 0.5 points or more, while students with prior higher GPAs showed a much smaller effect on their grades. Thus, “while online courses may have the potential to differentiate coursework to meet the needs of students with weaker incoming skills, current online courses, in fact, do an even worse job of meeting the needs of these students than do traditional in-person courses,” according to the study.

The general conclusion of the study was that “students in online courses perform substantially worse than students in traditional in-person courses and that experience in these online courses impact performance in future classes and their likelihood of dropping out of college.” These findings are consistent with prior studies of online education in other settings, such as community colleges and highly competitive four-year institutions that also showed that online courses yield worse average outcomes than in-person courses.

Despite these numbers, online courses continue to be an alternative to some students who, because of personal circumstances, have no other choices. Yet, most of the students enrolled in these kinds of courses attend for-profit institutions, which are non-selective and typically serve students with weaker academic preparation and fewer economic resources than students who attend more selective colleges and universities.

Is there a better way to offer these courses? The authors of this study think so. They believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) can adapt course material better to the needs of a diverse group of students, since these systems assess students’ current weaknesses, but also diagnose why students make specific errors. Nonetheless, “the tremendous scale and consistently negative effects of current offerings points to the need to improve these courses, particularly for students most at risk of course failure and college dropout,” conclude the authors.

In other words, online courses should not be designed to just mirror the in-person experience, but should use the latest technology to make them more flexible and adaptable to the specific students’ needs. The only problem with this conclusion is that the application of advanced technologies such as AI increases the cost of delivery of online education. And who is going to pay for that? After all, the application of AI to education requires expert personnel, time and effort, which all that costs money.

This certainly challenges the conventional wisdom that online education will always be cheaper since economics seems to be the real reason why for-profit private institutions and public ones with diminishing state support are offering online courses.

Sooner or later policy makers, college administrators, and the general public will have to face the reality that quality education, just as healthcare or good infrastructure, costs money and that there is no technological fix to that.

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Online Education is Faulty and Needs Reform

In the last few months we have witnessed a number of political debates that have become part of the national discussion on issues such as healthcare, immigration, infrastructure, freedom of speech, the media and truth itself. What is the connection between these topics and higher education? It is much more obvious than you might think.

National progress – economic, social and individual – depends on winning these debates. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, large parts of the nation’s transportation system, as well as the public higher education system, have all been heavily funded by the federal government through taxation. The rationale for this funding is that all of these programs and institutions provide services for the common good. The government has developed legislation that set the parameters under which they operate and are funded.

And this is not unique to this country. Other developed nations have established similar support services; some to an even larger extent than in the U.S. Why is that? The answer is relatively very simple, but not obvious to everyone. It has to do with the very basis of democracy as a concept: individual freedom, social responsibility, openness, equal opportunities and prosperity.

What we have done when developing democracies is to create environments in which people can adapt to change. By doing so, we as a society can foster more equality and greater opportunities. For these reasons western democracies have been examples of stAnd if you think that higher education is not really part of that mix, think again. The national system of highways that we developed after World War II was essential for the economic development across the nation. It was paid largely by taxpayers who, in turn, saw the economies of their states grow.

Similarly, the large investment that the federal government made since the Civil War creating the system of land-grant universities, providing funding for scholarly activities, and tuition payments or low-interest loans to college students, whether they were military veterans or not, helped propel national progress.

Now think of highways, bridges, and infrastructure in general. Because of lowering taxation, they are crumbling around the country. Some think that privatization may be the solution, but that means higher prices at the tolls, lower standards of maintenance and fewer safety regulations. After all, the bottom line of any private corporation is to generate profits.

We are seeing the same going on with higher education. Student debt is climbing to astronomical levels not only because for-profit universities encourage their students (mostly low and lower middle-class ones) to take on debt while public institutions have to raise their tuition and fees in order to operate because their states are providing them with less and less financial support.

Because of these fundamental changes in how we economically support these infrastructures, we are seeing society rattling since people are losing their trust in the political and economic system to provide them the fairness they expect. And this has been decades in the making. Since the 1980s anti-government and anti-intellectual rhetoric has undermined trust in government as a tool for prosperity. The result? We are pointing fingers for the maladies of society unto “others,” whether they are ethnic groups different from the traditional dominant ones, immigrants, or the news media.

No wonder we see populist demagogues harvesting large portions of popular support in an embrace of far right-wing ideologies that promise greatness based on hatred, simplistic but false solutions and lies. It was not long ago that fascist and Nazi regimes rose to power resulting in wars, ruin and spaces for far left-wing ideologies that predicated greatness for their peoples, but were also based in hatred, simplistic solutions and lies that did not work either. Both degenerated into less prosperity and widening inequality.

However, the fact of the matter is that large sections of the population are facing similar conditions to the ones that generated the totalitarian regimes that created so much misery while solving nothing. It does not help that liberal democracies like ours allowed the 2008 financial crisis in which so many lost so much while not seeing any accountability being required from those responsible for that crisis. Or to see Great Britain undergoing the Brexit process that is already generating chaos and turmoil in the U.K., or the rise of worldwide discontent that has been harvested by extremist parties that see only economic elites really prospering in these conditions.

So, what is the role for colleges and universities at this momentous place in time? There was a time when society looked at professors and researchers at academic centers for answers to the problems of society. Not anymore.

Now academics are vilified by the media, their expertise is ignored – if not outright ridiculed – and their wisdom is substituted by “talking points” from sources funded by special interests. But let’s face it, institutions of higher education were never prepared to deal with well-organized and well-funded anti-intellectual campaigns. And to make things worse, for the most part they still have to wake up from the dream that there is wide public support for universities and from the illusion that ample financial government backing will return.

It is time for academics to take these threats as an opportunity and to herald colleges and universities as what they really are: pillars of truth and engines of human equality, opportunity and prosperity for all.

What we need is to promote higher education as a banner of progress, democracy and justice. Unless we develop this message coherently and clearly, we will succumb to the worst of human proclivities and repeat the errors that cost us so much in the past. As the philosopher George Santayana once said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

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The Higher Purpose of Higher Education is Real