Nothing goes out of date faster than a scholarly history book.

This is, of course, a terrible shame. It not only leads junior scholars to disregard earlier scholarship and attempt to reinvent the wheel, but it means that alternate methodologies, sources and conceptual and interpretive frameworks are often considered out-of-date and are therefore overlooked.

A quarter century ago, Harvey J. Graff, a leading historian of literacy, published a fascinating study of the trajectories that American youth in four distinct historical eras navigated as they made the tangled transition to adulthood.

Conflicting Paths, which drew upon some 500 published and unpublished autobiographies, diaries, memoirs and personal letters to capture the subjective experience of young people as they matured, underscored the uncertainties, confusions and challenges the young encountered in their divergent paths to adulthood.

Biases in the extant first-person sources limited what Graff could say about the poor and the working class and nonwhites. Nevertheless, he was able to identify a multiplicity of pathways into adult status as well as how individuals made sense of their personal experience and crafted their distinctive, individual life story.

Especially intriguing were the stark contrasts between the twisted, messy realities of growing up and various culture myths and stereotypes that established certain normative expectations that few young people’s lives actually conformed to.

His overarching historical argument is threefold:

Today, the path to maturity is at least as diverse and certainly as complex, contradictory and convoluted as it was earlier in American history. Class remains vitally important, but so, too, do the various intersectional identities that color young people’s opportunities, aspirations, expectations and perception of their options, heavily influence their emotions and mindset and define the resources and support structures that they can tap as they make crucial life decisions.

During the last century, the United States, at enormous public expense, constructed a set of educational institutions that were supposed to ease the transition to adulthood, making it more uniform, predictable, well-sequenced and successful.

But as a series of recently released reports reveal:

A study from the Brookings Institution, entitled “Diverging employment pathways among young adults,” reports that nearly 60 percent of those young people who experienced economic disadvantage in adolescence struggle financially during adulthood, with average annual incomes of $19,000 or less.

Contributors to their problems include very high rates of incarceration, early childbearing and low levels of education. In contrast, military service is strongly associated with upward economic mobility, partly because of the supports and benefits it offers, including job training, subsidized childcare, tuition assistance and health care—suggesting the kinds of support services that might make a big difference in reducing poverty rates.

A series of reports from Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce on the uncertain pathway from youth to a good job underscore several essential findings:

What, then, are the implications of these studies for two- and four-year colleges? Among the center’s recommendations are these:

There are other steps to take, such as rethinking licensure and certification requirements.

In a recent opinion essay, Ryan Craig, the author of College Disrupted and A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College, speaks out against the excessively aggressive licensing requirements that are all too often used to restrict entry into modestly skilled but decent-paying jobs and that have become major impediments to upward mobility.

The examples he cites are not just the usual suspects, like hair braiding or interior design, but various health-care support roles, like physical therapist assistant, which currently requires five semesters of courses in anatomy, physiology, exercise physiology, biomechanics, kinesiology, neuroscience, clinical pathology and behavioral science—even though the assistant role is limited to helping patients exercise and recording their progress. As Craig notes, they can perform those tasks only under the direct supervision of a licensed physical therapist. Yet the cost of such a program can exceed $100,000.

Craig’s takeaway: in cases like this one, professional associations and colleges are imposing unnecessary degree requirements not to ensure safety but to feather their own nests.

He ends his piece with a hope that colleges will become more mission- and civic-minded and not place institutional self-interest ahead of students’ interests. Hear! Hear!

The path to adulthood has never been easy, but as it grows ever longer and more circuitous, it is imperative that colleges reimagine their in loco parentis responsibilities. Too often we think of those supervisory and protective obligations in narrowly legal terms designed to minimize an institution’s potential liability in cases of harm.

But colleges’ duty of care should go well beyond the prevention of harassment, assault, hazing or suicide. Much as directors or officers of a corporation have a fiduciary responsibility to pursue their firm’s best interests, educators have a moral duty to act in their students’ best interests. That means:

During the early post–World War II era, becoming an adult was a one-time, all-at-once, irreversible, once-and-forever event. Today, in contrast, it’s an elongated process, filled with false starts, reversals, setbacks, stumbling blocks and lots of experimentation. It’s a process without a well-defined road map or widely accepted norms. For parents and young people alike, it’s a bewildering, pressure-packed process with lots of chances to fall off the rails.

In this highly ambiguous, uncertain environment, it’s more important than ever that faculty remember the Old English roots of the word “teacher.” That word, tæcan, means to show, point out, warn and persuade—in other words, to support, guide and counsel.

In your research, be an expert, a specialist and a professional. But as an instructor, be a mentor and ensure that your classes are about growth as well as content.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

When a college president resigns or retires, the institution’s governing board usually announces the steps it will take to replace the outgoing leader. The Board of Trustees of Parkland College followed that script in 2019 when Thomas Ramage told board members he planned to retire in 2022. But rather than provide an estimated timeline for replacing him, as is sometimes customary, the board president flipped the script and announced that a replacement would not be stepping in any time soon.

Ramage would instead spend the next three years essentially training his successor, Pamela Lau, the college’s chief academic officer. The move was part of an executive transition plan that also involved promoting Lau to executive vice president of the two-year college and informally making her “president designee.”

“Community college trustees from across the country talk about the importance of transition planning and how critical it is to the stability and success of their respective institutions,” Gregory Knott, the board chairman, said in a written statement announcing the plan. “We are taking proactive steps to put it into action here at Parkland College.”

Knott explained that while Ramage’s role would remain unchanged for three years, “he will be bringing Dr. Lau alongside him in the process to learn the complexities of the college presidency.”

In doing so, Knott said, “We have set Parkland up for a seamless transition, and the institution will be stronger because of it.”

Lau and Ramage, both veteran administrators at the institution in Champaign, Ill., and quintessential team players, were used to playing the long game—she has worked at Parkland for 28 years; Ramage worked there for 24 years—but even they questioned the lengthy time frame of the transition period.

“To be frank, looking back, both the outgoing president and I, as the incoming president, said it was kind of long,” Lau said. But she understood the plan was also forward-looking.

“One of the questions that was asked was, do we have somebody from within that would be ready to step in? And so, I was officially appointed and named as president designee.”

Nancy Sutton, vice president for academic services, said others at the college also wondered about the long wait time.

“When it was initially announced, everyone thought that a three-year transition period seemed like a very long time,” she said. “But from my standpoint, it always made a lot of sense because there’s so much that goes from one position to another.”

While it’s common for colleges and universities to have detailed executive transition plans, Parkland’s process is unusual. Community colleges tend to have fewer layers of executive positions and don’t typically need as much lead time for transitions of top leaders.

“I have not heard of other colleges that have taken this approach, but I do know that succession planning is something that leaders and board members discuss frequently,” Martha Parham, senior vice president of public relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said in an email. “That said, most search processes are open to applicants from across the country.”

But doing things differently is not necessarily a bad thing.

“Each college and its community is unique, and leaders and board members are best qualified to determine the best way to transition to a new CEO,” Parham said.

Lau, who became Parkland’s sixth president in January, now believes the transition period allowed her to see all the ins and outs of managing an institution with 8,533 students and 886 employees—especially during a global pandemic that hit colleges and universities particularly hard. The pandemic gave new meaning to the concept of on-the-job training.

“Watching how Dr. Ramage handled the crisis and sort of sitting right by him and being in all of those conversations was the lesson I think neither of us thought that we would experience,” she said. “There was great upheaval with the pandemic so, in that sense, I was able to learn in a different way, and that was a valuable thing.”

Other benefits of the long lag time from designee to successor became more apparent over the years.

“The president of a college these days is very much an outward-looking position, where you have to know the leaders in your community,” Lau said. “So it actually gave me an opportunity to be introduced, after the pandemic, to a lot of different people in the community. So when I actually assumed office in January of this year, it was no surprise to anyone.”

Lau joined Parkland’s faculty in 1995 as an instructor in the college’s developmental reading program and became director of the program in 2003. Two years later she led a task force that coordinated the institution’s academic support services into a one-stop Center for Academic Success, serving as its founding director and later becoming dean of academic services and then vice president for academic services. She won an Emerging Chief Academic Officer Award from the National Council of Instructional Administrators in 2017.

Lau said becoming president was not a long-term goal.

“I am actually not a very ambitious person. I would just take up meaningful opportunities and work hard,” she said. “I didn’t start out by thinking that this is where I want to be. I was actually quite content at every point in my career. I’m one of those few people who never had it on my radar to say, that’s what I am aiming for.”

Sutton has worked with Lau since 2005 and started working more closely with her in 2010, when Lau was dean of academic services and Sutton was chair of fine and applied arts. They also attended Ferris State University together and both received doctorate degrees in education from the local institution.

Sutton attributes a new “level of energy and excitement among the faculty and the staff” to Lau and believes her professional background will enhance her ability to lead the institution.

“One thing about Pam is she learns and listens from everything she does, and I think that’s the way she taught her students as well in the developmental reading classes,” Sutton said. “And her background simply benefits her in her ability to listen to what people need and to develop ideas and clearly explain the vision going forward.”

Sutton believes developing leaders from within can make for a “very strong institution.” Lau agrees.

“At Parkland, we have a very long tradition of raising leaders from within,” she said. “We look for ways to encourage people to grow as leaders, and I’m a product of that.”

Ramage is also part of that tradition. He applied for the president’s job in 2005 but was turned down because board members believed he lacked sufficient senior leadership experience. They chose an outside candidate who left the job less than a year later. Ramage applied again and was named president in 2007.

“I think the parallel is that back in 2007, when I got hired, some of the board members were the same when Dr. Lau’s time came up,” he said. “So they remembered that a national search isn’t always the best thing to do.”

There’s also a large pool of longtime employees at the college. Administrators, faculty and staff members tend to stay at the institution and work their way up, according to Lau. And Parkland’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning provides them support “in the creation and upkeep of their professional development plans,” according to the center’s website.

“We have a leadership development program that works at all levels of the college—faculty, staff, administration—and encourages people wherever they start at the institution … to look at what their next steps might be,” Ramage said.

Just three months into her presidency, Lau is still mapping out next steps for where she wants to take the college. She plans to focus on three main themes: expanding access to more students, helping students get and stay on guided pathways to degree completion, and encouraging students to value their time at Parkland.

She also plans to incorporate the lessons learned during the last three years into her management of the university: “Build a good team.” “Build a network of partnerships.” “It’s not about me.” “Value and affirm the team.” And, perhaps most importantly, “Find my own shoes.”

“Dr. Ramage was an excellent leader in so many ways. I initially felt the proverbial angst of having to fill his big shoes,” Lau wrote in an email. “I learned that a president has to walk the leadership journey in their own shoes, the ones that fit their feet. I must find and develop my own leadership personality and articulate my vision for Parkland College in my own voice.”

Lau earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Singapore, where she was born and raised. She immigrated to Illinois along with her husband and attended the University of Chicago, from which she received a master’s degree in philosophy in 1983.

“When I came to the United States, there was a possibility that, when I finished my graduate degree, I would go back to the university in Singapore to teach philosophy,” she said. “Then the paths of life changed and I didn’t go back. I stayed here.”

Lau didn’t set out to work at a community college and didn’t know much about them while living in Singapore, but she liked the mission of American two-year institutions.

“I was very drawn to the much more egalitarian approach that even if you didn’t do well, or you didn’t get the highest score in terms of grades but want the opportunity for higher education in the United States, there are community colleges that open that door for you,” she said. “I like that a lot, and it resonated deep within me, even though that was not how I grew up.”

Three years as president designee might seem a bit excessive to an outsider, but for an insider like Lau, it was just part of the arc of her nearly three-decade career at Parkland.

“So I always tell people, ‘I drank the Kool Aid,’” she said. “I’ve been at Parkland all these years, and I’ve had the opportunity to take responsibilities over the years, and that’s how I got where I am.”

Small groups of students recently walked through a hallway of portraits at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., quietly staring up at the rows of framed faces that seemed to stare back at them.

A guide encouraged students to focus on one victim and think about whom that person might have been before they were killed in a mass shooting by Nazi forces. One student fixated on a photo of a couple. Two other students stopped to scan the room, and one pointed out the large number of young victims in the portraits.

“This is heartbreaking,” he said. “Look at the children.”

The next day, a student stood for a long moment in front of another portrait, this time at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The photo was of Rhoda Phillips, a Black woman who had been enslaved in Nashville for over 30 years. Students milled around the museum, pausing to reflect on artifacts, from slave owners’ whips and shackles to Harriet Tubman’s hymnal.

The students from Adelphi University in Long Island, N.Y., visited the two Washington museums earlier this month to learn about their own histories, and each other’s, as a part of an inaugural trip for Black and Jewish students. The two-day trip was emotionally packed, with multihour visits to the two museums, a meeting with a Holocaust survivor and talks by historians and other experts.

David Machlis, an associate professor of finance and economics, said he organized the trip to help students look deeper into the painful histories that help contextualize bigotry against Black Americans and Jews today. He believes students will be newly inspired to combat an “epidemic in hatred”—a rise in racist and antisemitic incidents on college campuses and elsewhere across the country.

The most recent data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation shows hate crimes skyrocketed 11.6 percent nationwide between 2020 and 2021. The majority of victims, 65.4 percent, were targeted because of their race or ethnicity, and Black Americans were targeted more than any other group in the report. The latest report from the Anti-Defamation League, an organization tracking antisemitism since 1979, also found antisemitic incidents reached an all-time high in 2022, a 36 percent increase over the prior year. On college campuses, antisemitic incidents rose 41 percent.

Machlis, an octogenarian with a shock of gray hair and a thick Brooklyn accent, has no shortage of idealism about the impact his students could have on these troubling trends. He’s co-founder and vice chairman of International March of the Living, an educational program that takes participants, including high school students and others, to Poland and Israel to learn about the Holocaust.

“This is the most important program I’ve ever developed,” he said. “These are our future leaders.”

“I want to motivate students to all use their platform and stand up to combat racism, intolerance and antisemitism together,” he said. “Antisemitism is not just a Jewish issue, nor should combating racism be just a Black issue.”

Sentwali Bakari, vice president of student affairs at Adelphi, who was part of the group that visited the Washington museums, spoke passionately about how he wants student leaders to learn new lessons about how to work collaboratively in diverse environments, how to “recognize and appreciate and value the differences and simultaneously recognize so much we share.”

Adelphi is home to a fairly diverse student body that’s 9 percent Black, 21 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian and Pacific Islander, and 46 percent white.

“Colleges and universities are not immune from what’s going on in the big world,” Bakari said. “Right now, we see racial strife. We see so many things that are not healthy for our country. Whether it’s antisemitism or anti-Black, it’s happening in the country … We can’t be in a bubble.”

He expects when the students see news about antisemitism or anti-Black racism, they’ll now feel compelled to address it.

“This little, small trip could make a difference and spark a thirst for more research, more education, paying a little bit more attention to what’s going on in the world,” he said. “When they see things happening nationally, it might trigger something in them to take, at whatever level they can, their own active efforts to make a difference somehow.”

The group of 18 students—plus the campus Chabad rabbi and a handful of Adelphi administrators, staff and faculty members—arrived at the Holocaust museum after a roughly five-hour bus ride. They poured out of the bus in matching yellow “Two Museums Program” T-shirts and chatted lightly as they were shepherded through security to a classroom, where they heard some introductory remarks from Machlis and a brief history lesson from a Holocaust studies scholar.

As they emerged into the first exhibit of the museum, the tone of the group shifted from giddy to somber. They continued through the museum hushed, some alone or in pairs and others in small groups.

After winding their way through the exhibits for about an hour, small, impromptu group discussions sprang up. Students peppered the Holocaust educators brought in to accompany the group with questions: How did the swastika become a Nazi symbol? What did “SS” stand for? Was Judaism a religion or a race?

A Jewish freshman said he couldn’t stop staring at a photo of a Jewish couple who had died. They reminded him of him and his girlfriend.

“I could see their love,” said the freshman, who requested anonymity. “It was such a beautiful picture and they looked so happy … and yet they were soon about to be taken and probably separated and sent to death. It really made me sad.”

But he took comfort in being with classmates and seeing them emotionally affected as well. He described standing in a group and listening to one of his peers talk about her experience in the museum. He was moved to see someone who didn’t share his history discussing it in a way that was “so thoughtful and present and compassionate.”

The next day, after hearing from some Adelphi administrators and history experts at their hotel, students similarly navigated their way through the African American history museum, alone or in small clusters, taking in exhibits from the onset of European colonization of Africa through the civil rights movement.

“As we were looking at different sections of the museum, we connected in a way,” said Carlex Villier, a senior on the trip. “Even without speaking, we saw things together and acknowledged what happened in the past and how Black people have persevered through so many difficulties throughout history.”

For Villier, the son of Haitian immigrants, an exhibit about how slaves revolted in the Haitian Revolution brought him a sense of “joy” and left him feeling “prideful.”

“I feel like that’s something that doesn’t really get taught in school,” he said.

Over the course of the trip, both Black and Jewish students were confronted with meaningful, sometimes brutal, brushes with their own histories.

Darius Jones, a sophomore, said it was emotional to see a cabin built by a formerly enslaved person who shared his last name.

“It got me thinking, was that my ancestor?” he said. “It’s still on my mind right now.”

He said it was “heartbreaking” to see so many videos, images and artifacts demonstrating how “evil” people could be to one another.

Several Black students described feeling stilled by the section memorializing Emmett Till, a 14-year-old beaten and lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

For some students, the most impactful moments were engaging with their peers’ history.

Mickellie Wright, a freshman, said she felt emotionally “prepared” for the African American history museum because she’s so familiar with Black history, but parts of the exhibits at the Holocaust museum jarred her. An image that stuck with her was a single baby shoe amid piles of shoes that once belonged to Jews sent to concentration camps.

That shoe, and the cruelty it represented, “will forever stick with me,” she said.

The students were eager to share facts they learned and emotional moments they experienced—but there were also aspects of the program they would change for future years. Some suggested that more time to get to know each other before the trip would have been helpful. Bryce Ridley, a sophomore, said in the beginning of the trip, Black students and Jewish students stuck to themselves, at least at first.

“Towards the end of the trip, everyone came together,” he said.

Wright and other students said they’d like to see more Black speakers featured on future trips. Sophomore Madison Clampman, a Jewish student, agreed and added that having guides at the African American history museum, like they had at the Holocaust museum, would have been beneficial.

Over all, students said the trip accomplished what they hoped—bringing the stories of the Holocaust and African American history to life in ways their textbooks did not.

“To be able to be there, and see the exhibits, and to hear these stories—it’s a lot different from just reading it off of a page and having a test on it,” Clampman said.

Black and American Jewish communities have a history of addressing injustices together, Machlis noted. Jewish communal leaders famously marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and were among the founding members of the NAACP.

Fabian Burrell, coordinator for programming and community engagement at the Center for African, Black and Caribbean Studies at Adelphi, who was part of the group of museum visitors, noted there have also been challenging moments in Black-Jewish relations. She cited, for example, the Crown Heights riots, an outbreak of racial tensions between Orthodox Jews and Black residents in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1991 after a Hasidic man hit and killed a Black child while driving.

“What happens in one generation gets passed on to the younger one,” she said of the incident. “It caused a great rift in the Black community and the Jewish community. What we wanted is for these young people, as they’re coming up and they hear those stories, is to understand why things happen. It didn’t just happen out of a vacuum. It happened because people don’t understand each other.”

Students said going to both museums made them reflect on some of the similarities between their communities. Ridley said while the histories are different, he found himself drawing parallels between Black slavery and the Holocaust: how people were discriminated against because of their race or background, taken from their homes, and separated from their families.

“I was able to draw these comparisons and … see where these groups of people are today and how this affected them as a people,” Ridley said.

Lewis Gordon, who heads the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut, highlighted other ways these histories intersect. He noted that Black people living in Germany were also sent to concentration camps, and Nazi propaganda took inspiration from the writings of American eugenicists about Black and Native Americans in its messaging about Jews. He also noted Black and Jewish histories aren’t necessarily separate; there are Black Jews, like himself.

Creating a “meeting ground around struggles against dehumanization is important,” he said. “This is about trying to have a coalition against dehumanization and a coalition for a better project of democracy.”

He noted that some politicians, such as Florida governor Ron DeSantis, are trying to make “the very history of Black people illicit or illegal” by seeking to scrub concepts such as critical race theory from public education. He also pointed to several acts of violence against synagogues in recent years.

He believes the trip is a positive step toward combating exclusion and suggested adding a Native American history component in future years to further that goal.

Students and administrators are now reflecting on how the trip might influence their activities on campus and how they engage with other students going forward. Burrell wants to go on an International March of the Living trip to Poland in the future, and she’s invited Jewish students to her office to take advantage of her book collection on Black history and culture.

Jones said he bonded with students he’d never met before, and some are even talking about creating a podcast focused on Black voices at Adelphi. Many of the students said they plan to stay in touch with each other and tell other classmates about their experience.

Roodginia Guerrier, a senior, said she and other students left the museums feeling a sense of responsibility that their generation needs to “make sure history does not repeat itself.”

“It’s not that far in the past,” Guerrier said. “That’s what I really got from it. I’ve seen some trends going the wrong way, and I’m at the age where I’m not too young to forget. I can use my power in order to do something about it.”

Republicans on the House higher education subcommittee painted a bleak picture of the state of free speech on college campuses during a hearing Wednesday.

“Far too many higher education institutions claim to uphold this right, accept funding from the American taxpayer and then purposefully turn their backs and betray us,” said Utah representative Burgess Owens, a Republican who chairs the House Higher Education and Workforce Development Subcommittee.

Lawmakers and witnesses at the hearing pointed to incidents on campuses where students disrupted speakers, the use of bias reporting systems and a perceived lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty, staff and students, among other examples, as they sought to show how universities are failing to educate students and creating a climate of self-censorship.

“Our universities are failing miserably at the one thing they are being paid exorbitant amounts to do,” said Cherise Trump, executive director of Speech First, a free speech advocacy organization. “They are failing to educate students.”

Trump said later in the hearing that college policies such as bias reporting systems have created a climate where students are afraid to share their political opinions openly.

“Students are operating in a surveillance-like state,” she said. “They are actively censoring themselves out of fear of espousing the ‘wrong’ opinions.”

Democrats, meanwhile, focused on the recent rise in state laws and proposed bills that would limit what topics can be taught on college campuses.

“I’m deeply concerned about the academic censorship at all levels and including in higher education that’s being advanced by several Republican leaders, especially at the state level,” Oregon representative Suzanne Bonamici said. “This is actual censorship, silencing voices you don’t agree with.”

Suzanne Nossel, chief executive officer of PEN America, a free expression group, said during her testimony there’s a major difference between students disrupting a speaker and state policies.

“To enact legislation that cordons off certain concepts, that says, ‘This may not be taught,’ if you venture into this, you might get into trouble, as an American. That is very dangerous,” she said. “That’s the tactic we see in oppressive countries around the world where there is no buffer zone between the hand of the state and what happens on a university campus.

Virginia representative Bobby Scott, the top Democrat on the full House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said in his opening remarks that Republicans on the panel were not interested in “protecting all speech.”

“Instead, today’s hearing is an example of MAGA Republicans hijacking our shared value of free speech and waging a one-sided campaign to protect conservative speech,” he said. “MAGA Republicans and the far-right news media are peddling empty catchphrases like ‘cancel culture’ and ‘woke’ to fuel mass hysteria around an alleged conspiracy by institutions to degrade conservative free speech. This deliberately hides the real, current threat to free speech on campuses today—that is Republican politicians’ censorship of college curriculum.”

Steven Bloom, assistant vice president for government relations at the American Council on Education, said in an interview after the hearing that campus free speech and academic freedom are bedrock principles in higher education—and they are “alive and well.”

Bloom acknowledged that there are examples where institutions have fallen short, but he said that the lawmakers’ accusations that there’s a widespread issue is “inaccurate.”

Republicans, in their questioning of witnesses, did not talk about the state laws but said they were concerned about the barriers to recognition for conservative and religious student organizations; the perceived lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty, students and administration; the increase in diversity, equity and inclusion administrators; and the rise in antisemitism on college campuses.

Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, said during his testimony that what happens on college campuses has broader implications for American society.

“We used to think that what happened on college campuses, ‘Well, that’s just those crazy kids. Once they grow up and [are] exposed to the real world, things are going to change,’” he said. “All of the sudden these students are going to grow up and occupy positions in society all over the place … If they don’t believe that ideas that they don’t like are worthy of hearing, then our whole constitutional order is lost.”

Likewise, Owens said that the nation’s future is at stake “when our universities do nothing to safeguard free speech.”

“This committee should explore possible legislative avenues to create the right incentives to remind universities of the trust we give them when we fund them through our tax dollars,” he said. “That trust is to not be an adversary to our sacred free speech rights but to protect it. My colleagues and I have the delicate job of considering how to ensure compliance through enforcement mechanisms that our law currently lacks.”

Other lawmakers and several witnesses agreed that Congress should take action to address the issue, though they didn’t offer many specifics on what potential actions could look like.

Shapiro said that institutions must instill a culture of respect for opposing views and end compelled speech in the form of diversity statements.

“But it can’t all be done from within, so we need external controls from state legislators and attorneys general, as well as congressional oversight tied to federal funding,” he said.

Many of the questions and comments focused on the recent incident at Stanford University between law school students and Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Students protested and disrupted the talk hosted by the campus Federalist Society chapter. Tirien Angela Steinbach, an associate dean of the law school for diversity, equity and inclusion, intervened and voiced support for the students. University leaders later apologized to Duncan and put the associate dean on leave.

“It is because of incidents like this and administrators like Dean Steinbach that students, both conservative and liberal, at Stanford and college campuses around the country are too scared to speak up in the classroom and share their viewpoints,” said Josiah Joner, a sophomore at Stanford University. “It has instilled angst into each student for fear of sharing their opinions. Anything they say might also be viciously condemned by these same university administrators; the best option is to merely stay silent and keep one’s opinions to themselves.”

Joner said repeatedly during the hearing that what is needed is university officials who truly uphold principles of free speech.

“Students come to the university setting to receive an education to prepare them for the workforce and challenges of the future, but if administrations continue to condone violations of free speech and fail to take concrete steps to ensure they don’t happen in the first place, the acceptance of denying free speech will continue to grow amongst students as they eventually become the next leaders in government and business,” he said.

In 2021, the Indiana Commission for Higher Education reported that two out of three learners—we call them learners, not students, to dispel the image of the 18- to 22-year-old residential student—come to college with previous credit or prior learning. Today, equity and the competitive race to increase enrollments, coupled with the call for return on investment in higher education, have forced a conversation about learners and their transfer success. Effective transfer policies require collective action by both the sending and receiving institutions, including the fair treatment of all learners and all credits. There are too many broken links in the transfer chain. “Bought versus brought” credit, coined by the authors (Gentle-Genitty and Weber 2022), continues to fuel a war of sorts—a war where learners are the casualties and institutions fight among themselves, armed for battle and holding their ground.

For institutions, the war is over the relevance of money and value:

Calls for enhanced credit for prior learning practices and a push by policy makers to shore up the ROI for public higher education leaves some institutions tussling over whether to accept more credits. Cummings and colleagues (2021) report that institutions’ concerns coalesce around reduced income, impact on faculty load, straying from mission or becoming obsolete, to closures. Thus, they saddle up for battle emphasizing bought credit. The foundation of the institutional budget and business model is bought credit. Tuition is charged and faculty pay and workload are measured by bought credits. The relative or comparative success of many academic programs are in part measured by the full-time equivalent enrollments in their programs. Decreasing state support of higher education adds to the economic pressure at many public institutions who rely on external funding. Ultimately, it is more fiscally sound for the institution if learners buy or earn the credit directly. For outsiders, this translates into strict transfer policies and fewer resources dedicated to the transfer process, resulting in limited articulations, slow credit evaluations and scattered or absent prior-learning policies for learners other than the military. In sum, institutional transfer acceptance practices may cause an incentive business model where learners must buy credits (NECHE 2004). Receiving institutions place credit limits, accepting only a few credits beyond the associate degree (Moody 2019), with little regard for applicability to the learner’s next-level degree objective.

Brought credit is the most common currency in the transfer process. When packaged, it includes high school credit (Advanced Placement, exam, dual, concurrent and enrollment credit); two-year college credit (remedial education, general education, exploratory, prerequisites and major); four-year college credit (general education, campus required, major, minor and elective); international credit (varies based on degree and other credits); and other credits (prior learning, military, exam, test or portfolio credit). The previously discussed financial disincentives create a culture that favors bought credit at the expense of equity and learner centricity.

Many institutions claim maintenance of rigor, curricular control or accreditation standards, but the true question at play is whether the institution embraces a transfer-receptive culture (Taylor and Jain 2017). Much institutional behavior shows a self-fulfilling process shaped by management practices (Fabrizio, et al. 2005) around what can or cannot be counted. Crisp (2021), in an ACE report for their transfer task force, reviewed transfer and articulation agreements and noted that, although they meet a need as one of the most actionable ways to impact transfer, many lacked the curriculum alignment necessary to make any inroads for learners and the ability to apply their earned credits. In fact, institutions push such decisions to advisers far removed from the actual credit evaluation.

The most common result is that learners’ plans to leverage gained credits to save time and money toward the purchase of a credential fall short. They become disheartened when they learn that their credits are treated like foreign currency, feeling hoodwinked when they learn there is no standard exchange rate to convert their credits. Such inconsistencies hamper precision in converting brought credit even when both the sending and receiving institutions are accredited by the same body and based in the same state. Without a clear avenue to the conversion of credits to the local currency, learners are prevented from knowing how much their credit is worth or how much of the credential they can purchase with those brought credits. Such inconsistencies perpetuate inequity.

Institutions have historically been resistant to transfer credit, despite it being an essential component of student success. National organizations such as AACRAO, ACE, CHEA, the federal government, the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board and more are asking for institutions to look inward, redefine transfer and engage in transfer reform and reset. Use the past to guide the future, fix barriers to fair outcomes and address the broken system with a village. Solutions have been self-maintained at the status quo. Common metrics have masked successes, calling for more articulations and technology, when in fact fewer than 14 percent of transfer students complete and graduate with a bachelor’s degree, as reported by the Aspen Institute (Jenkins and Fink 2016).

Across the globe, learners are becoming mobile, and they expect to be able to engage in preferred learning opportunities or credentials that best suit their personal and career goals. Institutions must evolve to keep up with changing learner needs and the opportunities for improvement abound. Leaders like those in the academic services and enrollment management community are positioned to disrupt the status quo of relying on self-serving, self-fulfilling decision models, which handcuff institutions’ ability to see credit as currency and to change institutional equivalency practices. Using outdated mechanisms to process, accept and apply credit will continue to constrain universities and colleges, resulting in the loss of large numbers of learners and negatively influencing the long-term financial health of the institution. Transfer should be a priority to our institutions for our equity obligations, societal responsibility and to our revenue bottom line, even more so as we navigate a pandemic, a demographic shift and changing consumer demands. Repurposing our resources and prioritizing the fixing of the transfer problem is a necessity. It requires consistency. It requires someone intricately tied to the value of education to manage the tug-o-war over bought and brought credits. “To design a transfer student experience supportive of persistence and completion, higher education institutions must work collectively to create clearer transfer pathways with aligned guidance and support” (Fink 2021, 48).

Carolyn Gentle-Genitty is an AACRAO Member, an ACE fellow, tenured professor, research scholar and transfer expert with 24 years in higher ed and serves as Indiana University’s assistant vice president for university academic policy. She is a former director of the universitywide transfer office. Leading reverse transfer, articulation agreements, guaranteed admissions, transfer pathways, eight-week strategic transfer initiatives, best practice assessments and data alignment, she stands as a leader in transfer at the state and university level in Indiana. Jeff Weber is an AACRAO member with more than 30 years of experience in higher education policy and research. He is known for his acumen on transfer policy, transfer articulation for degrees and the analysis finesse for application to students. He currently serves as the universitywide assistant director for university academic policy and programs and is a former assistant program director for the University Transfer Office at Indiana University.

Joya Misra, Dawn Culpepper and KerryAnn O’Meara offer four strategies for ensuring workload and rewards systems equitably recognize the efforts of women faculty of color.

Could a Republican politician soon be taking the helm of another Florida university?

Florida representative Randy Fine said recently that Republican governor Ron DeSantis has pitched him on the presidential post at Florida Atlantic University, Florida Today reported. Fine, who has served in the Florida House of Representatives since 2016, said that DeSantis has approached him about taking the position, but he has not yet formally applied for the role.

Fine’s term is set to end next year, but he has already filed to run for a State Senate seat.

If hired, Fine would be the third former Republican politician tapped to lead a Florida university in recent months. Former U.S. senator from Nebraska Ben Sasse was hired as president of the University of Florida in November and formally stepped into the job in February. Richard Corcoran, a former Republican Speaker of the House in Florida’s Legislature who also served as the state’s education commissioner and as a member of the Florida Board of Governors, was hired as interim president of the New College of Florida in February, following a restructuring of NCF’s board, with DeSantis appointing conservative trustees who pushed out the prior president.

Similarly, former Republican state lawmaker and DeSantis ally Ray Rodrigues was hired from a pool of only eight candidates as chancellor of the State University System of Florida in September.

FAU is currently led by an interim president, with a presidential search ongoing. Fine’s interest in the job is unclear given that he told Florida Today that he is currently “focused on the Legislature.”

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education has issued a show cause order to the King’s College in New York City, which has faced recent financial issues and possible closure.

The accreditor issued the show cause order Wednesday, noting that there was “insufficient evidence that the institution is in compliance” with MSCHE standards on “planning, resources, and institutional improvement.” The show cause order is due April 18 and must demonstrate that the King’s College “has achieved and can sustain ongoing compliance with commission’s standards, requirements, policies and procedures, and federal compliance requirements.”

MSCHE previously required the college to submit a teach-out plan.

The King’s College, a private Christian university on Wall Street, announced earlier this year that it needed $2.6 million to meet its “immediate needs.” The college has attributed its financial struggles to issues related to the coronavirus pandemic and economic challenges. However, the King’s College has also experienced the loss of major donors in recent years, who previously plugged a persistent budget deficit and launched an ambitious online expansion plan that was soon aborted.

The fate of the college remains unclear after the end of the current academic year.

Today on the Academic Minute: Marilynn Desmond, distinguished research professor at Binghamton University, uses the example of Christine de Pizan to show how writers who lived through war can help bring different perspectives to these conflicts. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

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