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Parchment, a leading digital transcript sharing company, expanded into new territory this week by acquiring Quottly, a company that sells software for course and program sharing, managing dual enrollment, and automating and streamlining transfer agreements.
Leaders of the companies say combining their operations—transcript exchanging and credit transfer—can help institutions better handle the many moving parts of the transfer process and make students’ transition from one institution to another more efficient. Some higher ed experts see the move as a response to demand for a more comprehensive transfer management platform when some universities are using multiple, disparate digital tools to shepherd students through an already complex process.
Transfer students, on average, lose 43 percent of their credits, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in a 2017 report. Meanwhile, fewer than a quarter of colleges and universities share transcripts with each other electronically, according to a 2021 report by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). Only about half of colleges and universities nationwide have automated articulation rules governing which course credits count and are automatically applied.
“If you’ve attended multiple colleges and maybe took some dual-enrollment courses in high school or AP courses, to get your records together to make them available to the college to which you’re transferring—and for them to be able to take the time to key punch all of the course information, all of the credits and grades, and run it through the evaluation system—is a big point of friction,” said Matthew Pittinsky, CEO of Parchment. “The other is the evaluation of courses and the management of equivalencies”—which classes at one institution count for credit toward a specific degree at another.
Pittinsky said transferring credits is the most common reason students request digital transcripts through Parchment. He sees the acquisition as a way to tap into an “underserved technology market” at a time when college leaders are “looking to make transfer a bigger part of their enrollment strategy” in response to pandemic enrollment declines.
Both platforms will still be available separately, but “they’ll have better connections between them, and they’ll have additional capabilities because of the overall capabilities of the combined organization,” he added.
Alicia Policinski, CEO and co-founder at Quottly, said the acquisition also brings a more “seamless student experience and a seamless administrator experience” to a wider network of college and university systems and their students. The platform automates the course evaluation and approval process for administrators, and students have a dashboard where they can search shared and transferable courses between institutions. She said the wider the network of colleges using the platform becomes, the more useful it is.
Parchment is a juggernaut in its niche of the ed-tech world, serving about 2,800 colleges and universities in the U.S. and more than 100 higher ed institutions abroad, according to its website. Quottly is a much smaller but growing operation, working with over 220 colleges and universities, including the Montana University System, the University System of Maryland and California Virtual Campus.
Policinski said she wishes the institutions she attended had access to this software when she was a transfer student.
“I ended up taking an extra year of school because I miscounted one course,” she said. “Tuition wasn’t cheap. It was a very expensive error on my part.”
Sarah Zauner, executive director of the Ada Center, which advises higher ed institutions on decisions about technology, said colleges badly need “viable technology tools that comprehensively support student transfer,” given the maze of piecemeal options currently available to handle different parts of the process.
“Right now, most colleges and universities use a combination of a degree audit, degree planner, a separate transfer database, the websites of other institutions, often a digital credential service like Parchment, and possibly a transfer workflow tool to help students navigate pathways across institutions,” she said in an email. “Nearly everyone at an institution would tell you these disconnected software tools reinforce student confusion (and costly mistakes) on the path to transfer.”
She believes the acquisition is a “signal that the private sector is realizing there is unmet need in the field for a more holistic approach to helping institutions (and students) with a better approach to designing pathways across institutions.”
While that’s “good news,” she added that technology can only do so much when institution-level transfer policies remain convoluted and decentralized. Often faculty members are evaluating courses, academic advisers are guiding students and administrators are making the higher-level policy decisions. Meanwhile, students, not knowing where to go for information, turn to the internet.
“The challenge here is you’re dealing with a lot of messy policies and practices, and technology can kind of ratify those and codify that messiness, but it can’t fix it,” she said.
John Fink, senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, agreed these tools are useful, “but it really comes down to how they’re implemented.” They can offer major “efficiency gains,” but they’re not a panacea.
“What’s hard, and what I don’t think there’s a technological fix for, is the process of colleges working with students early on, even as a part of recruitment, to think and plan and explore what they’re interested and know which courses best align to those goals so students aren’t just taking courses that will be accepted at a university, for instance, but they’re taking the right courses,” he said. “It requires advising, program alignment, more human-process sorts of things.”
Policinski said technology can’t replace improving institutional and state transfer policies, but it can help.
She noted that Quottly’s platform makes it easier for academic advisers to efficiently and accurately guide students, and students can track how the courses they’ve taken, or will take, at one institution count toward a specific degree program at another.
“What we found is that the technology needs to work in support of these policy improvements that states are enacting,” such as instituting statewide guaranteed transfer pathways, she said. “We’re able to really program the good policy work that’s being done into the software for the benefit of students, as well as administrators.”
Pittinsky said transfer policy solutions only work if universities have the technology to implement them. Notably, colleges can’t give “consistent” or “timely” answers to students about what course credits count without a centralized database of which courses are equivalent to each other between institutions.
“We could walk through each of the areas where I think most people would say transfer should just work better, and there is a technology component,” he said.
He sees the offerings of Parchment and Quottly as an example.
Combining tools for transcript exchange and “taking the data that are inside of transcripts and helping students more successfully transfer and … get to their degree faster and at a lower cost,” he said, “we just think is a really exciting combination.”
Parchment, a leading digital transcript sharing company, expanded into new territory this week by acquiring Quottly, a company that sells software for course and program sharing, managing dual enrollment, and automating and streamlining transfer agreements.
Leaders of the companies say combining their operations—transcript exchanging and credit transfer—can help institutions better handle the many moving parts of the transfer process and make students’ transition from one institution to another more efficient. Some higher ed experts see the move as a response to demand for a more comprehensive transfer management platform when some universities are using multiple, disparate digital tools to shepherd students through an already complex process.
Transfer students, on average, lose 43 percent of their credits, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found in a 2017 report. Meanwhile, fewer than a quarter of colleges and universities share transcripts with each other electronically, according to a 2021 report by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO). Only about half of colleges and universities nationwide have automated articulation rules governing which course credits count and are automatically applied.
“If you’ve attended multiple colleges and maybe took some dual-enrollment courses in high school or AP courses, to get your records together to make them available to the college to which you’re transferring—and for them to be able to take the time to key punch all of the course information, all of the credits and grades, and run it through the evaluation system—is a big point of friction,” said Matthew Pittinsky, CEO of Parchment. “The other is the evaluation of courses and the management of equivalencies”—which classes at one institution count for credit toward a specific degree at another.
Pittinsky said transferring credits is the most common reason students request digital transcripts through Parchment. He sees the acquisition as a way to tap into an “underserved technology market” at a time when college leaders are “looking to make transfer a bigger part of their enrollment strategy” in response to pandemic enrollment declines.
Both platforms will still be available separately, but “they’ll have better connections between them, and they’ll have additional capabilities because of the overall capabilities of the combined organization,” he added.
Alicia Policinski, CEO and co-founder at Quottly, said the acquisition also brings a more “seamless student experience and a seamless administrator experience” to a wider network of college and university systems and their students. The platform automates the course evaluation and approval process for administrators, and students have a dashboard where they can search shared and transferable courses between institutions. She said the wider the network of colleges using the platform becomes, the more useful it is.
Parchment is a juggernaut in its niche of the ed-tech world, serving about 2,800 colleges and universities in the U.S. and more than 100 higher ed institutions abroad, according to its website. Quottly is a much smaller but growing operation, working with over 220 colleges and universities, including the Montana University System, the University System of Maryland and California Virtual Campus.
Policinski said she wishes the institutions she attended had access to this software when she was a transfer student.
“I ended up taking an extra year of school because I miscounted one course,” she said. “Tuition wasn’t cheap. It was a very expensive error on my part.”
Sarah Zauner, executive director of the Ada Center, which advises higher ed institutions on decisions about technology, said colleges badly need “viable technology tools that comprehensively support student transfer,” given the maze of piecemeal options currently available to handle different parts of the process.
“Right now, most colleges and universities use a combination of a degree audit, degree planner, a separate transfer database, the websites of other institutions, often a digital credential service like Parchment, and possibly a transfer workflow tool to help students navigate pathways across institutions,” she said in an email. “Nearly everyone at an institution would tell you these disconnected software tools reinforce student confusion (and costly mistakes) on the path to transfer.”
She believes the acquisition is a “signal that the private sector is realizing there is unmet need in the field for a more holistic approach to helping institutions (and students) with a better approach to designing pathways across institutions.”
While that’s “good news,” she added that technology can only do so much when institution-level transfer policies remain convoluted and decentralized. Often faculty members are evaluating courses, academic advisers are guiding students and administrators are making the higher-level policy decisions. Meanwhile, students, not knowing where to go for information, turn to the internet.
“The challenge here is you’re dealing with a lot of messy policies and practices, and technology can kind of ratify those and codify that messiness, but it can’t fix it,” she said.
John Fink, senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, agreed these tools are useful, “but it really comes down to how they’re implemented.” They can offer major “efficiency gains,” but they’re not a panacea.
“What’s hard, and what I don’t think there’s a technological fix for, is the process of colleges working with students early on, even as a part of recruitment, to think and plan and explore what they’re interested and know which courses best align to those goals so students aren’t just taking courses that will be accepted at a university, for instance, but they’re taking the right courses,” he said. “It requires advising, program alignment, more human-process sorts of things.”
Policinski said technology can’t replace improving institutional and state transfer policies, but it can help.
She noted that Quottly’s platform makes it easier for academic advisers to efficiently and accurately guide students, and students can track how the courses they’ve taken, or will take, at one institution count toward a specific degree program at another.
“What we found is that the technology needs to work in support of these policy improvements that states are enacting,” such as instituting statewide guaranteed transfer pathways, she said. “We’re able to really program the good policy work that’s being done into the software for the benefit of students, as well as administrators.”
Pittinsky said transfer policy solutions only work if universities have the technology to implement them. Notably, colleges can’t give “consistent” or “timely” answers to students about what course credits count without a centralized database of which courses are equivalent to each other between institutions.
“We could walk through each of the areas where I think most people would say transfer should just work better, and there is a technology component,” he said.
He sees the offerings of Parchment and Quottly as an example.
Combining tools for transcript exchange and “taking the data that are inside of transcripts and helping students more successfully transfer and … get to their degree faster and at a lower cost,” he said, “we just think is a really exciting combination.”
Latinas are enrolling in and graduating from Hispanic-serving institutions at higher rates than Latinos, according to a new analysis from Excelencia in Education, an organization focused on Latina and Latino student success.
The analysis, released Thursday, found that almost half, 48 percent, of the women attending Hispanic-serving institutions in fall 2020 were Latinas. Latinas also made up almost two-thirds of the Hispanic student population at these colleges and universities.
Latina women attending Hispanic-serving institutions also earned more than 300,000 degrees in 2020, almost 120,000 more than their Latino peers, according to the analysis. Degree attainment among Latina students at these institutions rose 52 percent from 2015 to 2020, compared to an increase of 44 percent among Latino men over the same time period. However, most Latinas age 25 and older still lack a college degree. Of Latina adults in 2021, 53 percent have a high school education or less, while 29 percent held an associate degree or higher.
Latinas are enrolling in and graduating from Hispanic-serving institutions at higher rates than Latinos, according to a new analysis from Excelencia in Education, an organization focused on Latina and Latino student success.
The analysis, released Thursday, found that almost half, 48 percent, of the women attending Hispanic-serving institutions in fall 2020 were Latinas. Latinas also made up almost two-thirds of the Hispanic student population at these colleges and universities.
Latina women attending Hispanic-serving institutions also earned more than 300,000 degrees in 2020, almost 120,000 more than their Latino peers, according to the analysis. Degree attainment among Latina students at these institutions rose 52 percent from 2015 to 2020, compared to an increase of 44 percent among Latino men over the same time period. However, most Latinas age 25 and older still lack a college degree. Of Latina adults in 2021, 53 percent have a high school education or less, while 29 percent held an associate degree or higher.
Transfers between community colleges and four-year institutions continued to drop last fall, an ongoing trend since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But the report also contains some good news, including that six-year college completion rates among transfer students improved, despite the disruptive nature of the pandemic.
The “Transfer and Progress” report, released today, found that upward transfer—transfers from community colleges to universities—fell 7.5 percent in fall 2022 compared to the prior year and 14.5 percent relative to fall 2020.
The number of transfer students over all, including students transferring from universities to community colleges or between four-year institutions, fell at a higher rate than the enrollment declines of nontransfer students, 2.3 percent and 1.4 percent, respectively. Students who transferred in the fall 2022 term made up a lesser share of the student population of four-year institutions across racial and ethnic groups, with the exception of Black transfer students who enrolled in private, nonprofit four-year universities, the report noted.
Doug Shapiro, executive director of the research center, said the ongoing decrease in upward transfers is “very concerning.”
“Upward transfer has continued to decline pretty steadily at this point in every year since the pandemic,” Shapiro said during a media briefing Wednesday. “This suggests that baccalaureate attainment is beginning to appear increasingly out of reach for community college students,” particularly for students enrolled in urban and suburban community colleges, which saw steeper declines in transfers to universities than community colleges in towns or rural areas.
The report also found that, perhaps counterintuitively, community colleges with “a high transfer program focus” also had steeper declines in upward transfer than community colleges more focused on vocational programs.
Some types of students transferred at higher rates than others, according to the report. Transfers by women decreased more than men, 3.5 percent and 0.7 percent, respectively. Only students younger than age 20 transferred at higher rates than the year before, while transfers in every other age group fell. Students who earned an associate degree also transferred at lower rates than those who didn’t.
The report also disaggregated data by students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and found that transfer to the roughly 200 most highly selective institutions were disproportionately by students from families with the top 20 percent of household incomes in the country.
Tania LaViolet, director of the bachelor’s attainment portfolio at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, found this data point particularly disheartening, though not surprising.
“Our hope is that community college transfer could be a means to increase opportunity for those from the most financially disadvantaged backgrounds, especially at the highly selective four-year institutions,” she said. “What the data from the clearinghouse show is that hasn’t come to pass … Those outcomes are a reflection of institutional practice. Are your systems at the four-year institution, and in partnership with your community colleges, are they set up to serve low-income students or do they perpetuate inequality?”
The report also had some bright spots—notably, that transfers rose by 5.4 percent among students who previously stopped out of college. Institutions that primarily serve students online were responsible for 40 percent of that surge.
Six-year completion rates also rose among transfer students for whom the pandemic hit during their fifth or sixth year enrolled in college, which is when transfer students from community colleges typically graduate, the report noted. Among transfer students who started at a community college in 2016, 69.2 percent graduated within six years, a little over two percentage points higher than those who started college in 2014. Black transfer students in particular made gains in their six-year completion rates, which rose more than four percentage points for students who started college in 2016 compared to 2014.
“It is very encouraging that among those who transferred from community colleges into four-year schools six years ago, those students are now completing bachelor’s degrees at higher rates than before, and that’s true despite the fact that the final two years … of that six-year window were the first two years of the pandemic,” Shapiro said. “Despite those disruptions of the pandemic, that cohort of students still earned bachelor’s degrees at a higher rate than the students who started in 2015 or 2014 at community colleges.”
LaViolet said while the data about six-year completion rates are positive, it also shows that “the act of transferring is the hardest part of the process.”
“The report shows here that the bulk of those students who transfer actually complete, so more than half of the problem is with the transfer process itself at the front end,” she said. “So, this is just more evidence of where we need to invest our attention, as institutional leaders, as practitioners, in really smoothing out and making less complex, less clunky that transfer process.”
Matthew Sheldon, associate director of the transfer team at EAB, an education consulting firm, said other data points made him hopeful for the future. For example, reverse transfers, students transferring from universities to community colleges, and lateral transfers, between four-year universities and between two-year colleges, started to rebound.
He also believes the boost in younger students transferring is a hopeful sign, and that universities should focus on providing clear information about how their credits will transfer and how long it will take to get a degree, “and, most importantly, how much money is this all going to cost them, and doing it in a way that captures students that are under 20 years old” through easy-to-use online resources.
“There are numbers to be excited about in here even with some of the declines that we see,” he said.
Sheldon is concerned that some campus leaders might see a continued decline in upward transfers as a reason to turn attention and resources away from transfer students and toward bolstering enrollment among other student groups instead.
But “transfer is really important, and these students really matter,” he said. “Supporting transfer students is a way that we can make a difference in our educational gaps and our opportunity gaps. What I really don’t want to have happen is have people look at the statistic and say, ‘We’re down across the board and we can make up for it in other ways.’ I want to say, ‘Hey, we’re down, but there are still a lot of students out there we are missing, and we need to capture them and support them through their educational journey.’”
Student prayer gatherings have recently cropped up at secular colleges and universities following the nonstop, two-week prayer service led by students at Asbury University. The Asbury revival drew tens of thousands of worshippers to the Christian college in Kentucky, The Christian Post reported.
Students at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green who attended the spontaneous mass event at Asbury held a prayer service that drew several hundred people last Thursday on the National Collegiate Day of Prayer, the final day of the Asbury gathering. Students at Ohio State University similarly gathered that day in their student union building and prayed until early the next morning.
“We have long been praying for and continue to pray for revival on our campus,” Tommy Johnson, a campus minister for Western Kentucky University’s Baptist Campus Ministry, told The Christian Post. “And we discussed how revival is measured not merely by how many students gather or how long they stay at an event but by the result of life change.”
The Onondaga Community College Board of Trustees approved a $75,000 early-retirement incentive for senior faculty members on Tuesday in response to enrollment losses.
The two-year college in Syracuse, part of the State University of New York system, experienced a steep enrollment decline over the last decade, from about 13,000 students in 2012 to slightly over 7,300 last year, WRVO reported. Faculty members over the age of 55 are eligible for the new early-retirement package, which includes postretirement health insurance.
Warren Hilton, president of Onondaga, told WRVO that the college could save between $1.5 million and $1.7 million in the next budget year if 15 faculty members retire early. Out of 142 full-time faculty members, 51 are eligible to take the offer.
Student prayer gatherings have recently cropped up at secular colleges and universities following the nonstop, two-week prayer service led by students at Asbury University. The Asbury revival drew tens of thousands of worshippers to the Christian college in Kentucky, The Christian Post reported.
Students at Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green who attended the spontaneous mass event at Asbury held a prayer service that drew several hundred people last Thursday on the National Collegiate Day of Prayer, the final day of the Asbury gathering. Students at Ohio State University similarly gathered that day in their student union building and prayed until early the next morning.
“We have long been praying for and continue to pray for revival on our campus,” Tommy Johnson, a campus minister for Western Kentucky University’s Baptist Campus Ministry, told The Christian Post. “And we discussed how revival is measured not merely by how many students gather or how long they stay at an event but by the result of life change.”
The Onondaga Community College Board of Trustees approved a $75,000 early-retirement incentive for senior faculty members on Tuesday in response to enrollment losses.
The two-year college in Syracuse, part of the State University of New York system, experienced a steep enrollment decline over the last decade, from about 13,000 students in 2012 to slightly over 7,300 last year, WRVO reported. Faculty members over the age of 55 are eligible for the new early-retirement package, which includes postretirement health insurance.
Warren Hilton, president of Onondaga, told WRVO that the college could save between $1.5 million and $1.7 million in the next budget year if 15 faculty members retire early. Out of 142 full-time faculty members, 51 are eligible to take the offer.
The nonstop, two-week prayer session at Asbury University that brought tens of thousands of people from across the country to the Christian campus in Kentucky has finally ended. But speculation is continuing about why and how the event, dubbed the “Asbury revival” or “outpouring,” occurred and what it means and says about the intersection of faith and academics on religious campuses.
Videos of students and visitors praying and singing, playing instruments, crying, and embracing one another continue to circulate on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms, and the internet is rife with commentary from scholars, campus leaders and theologians attempting to contextualize the event that has captivated religious communities and campuses. Some remain in awe of the fervor and grassroots nature of the event, while others are skeptical of its motives and outcomes.
University leaders say the phenomenon started when some students stayed late after a chapel service on Feb. 8 to continue singing and praying—and didn’t leave. Then other students joined them over several days that stretched into a week, and then another week.
Zeke Atha, a student at Asbury, said he lingered at the chapel service for an extra moment to reflect and then went to class as usual. When class finished, he was surprised to still hear singing coming from the chapel.
“So, I went back up. It was surreal,” he said in a documentary by Sojourner Films, a Christian film company. “The peace that was in the room was unexplainable. A couple buddies and I just went to run around to the different classrooms and barged in on classes and said, ‘Revival is happening.’”
By the time university leaders concluded the gathering, an estimated 50,000 students and visitors had come to the campus to pray, said Kevin Brown, Asbury’s president. The outpouring attracted students from more than 260 colleges and universities, many drawn by social media livestreams and posts. Similar prayer services cropped up at other Christian universities, including Lee University in Tennessee, Cedarville University in Ohio and Samford University in Alabama.
There were also some false starts. Students at Union College in Kentucky reportedly tried to start their own service but had disagreements with administrators over logistics, Fox 56 News reported.
“I don’t view this as something solely owned by Asbury,” Brown said. “I would be excited to see the same spiritual hunger, and the same hearts being stirred, occur at colleges and universities throughout the country, throughout the world, to see that happen in other churches, to see that happen in other communities.”
Asbury is part of the Wesleyan theological tradition, which emphasizes transformational encounters with the Holy Spirit. The university has had lengthy revivals before, including one in 1970 that canceled classes for a week and included at least 144 consecutive hours of prayer, according to the university’s website.
Frank Yamada, executive director of the Association of Theological Schools, said what happened at Asbury seems counterintuitive, given various research showing that young Americans are increasingly disaffected with organized religion. For example, only 38 percent of younger millennials identify religion as “very important” in their lives compared to 53 percent of Americans in Generation X and 58 percent of baby boomers, according to Pew Research Center data. A survey from the American Enterprise Institute found that a third of Generation Z identifies as religiously unaffiliated compared to 29 percent of millennials, a quarter of Generation X and 18 percent of baby boomers.
Yamada believes students were motivated by a longing for “a deeper sense of connection to God and to each other,” perhaps partly fueled by “political and social fragmentation” and “coming out of a global pandemic, a time of really deep isolation.”
“People are looking for signs of hope, looking for signs of being connected to each other rather than being divided from each other,” he said. “There are a lot of social factors that could point to this being a meaningful moment.”
Brown emphasized that young adults have had a “multiyear cocktail of really difficult things that they’ve had to process.”
“They’ve had political polarization. They’ve had economic uncertainty. We’ve seen social unrest; we’ve seen racial injustice, global wars. And then in the midst of that we had a global pandemic,” he said. “All of this is exacerbated by phones and social media, which creates this hyperawareness of unsettling phenomenon and the reinforcement of our own ideological echo chambers. There is a hunger for something more, and I think that hunger is acutely felt by younger generations … They strongly value authenticity. They want something genuine, they want something real, and they want that from their church and they want that from their Christian institutions as well.”
The surge of worshippers overwhelmed the campus and the sleepy town of Wilmore, which is home to roughly 6,000 residents, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Cars streamed into the city, backing up traffic and filling the town’s parking spaces.
“We have two stoplights, to give you an idea of how large our town is,” Brown said. Suddenly having to figure out how to accommodate thousands of visitors “on the fly” was “unnerving and unsettling.”
“Our town and our institutions are just not equipped to absorb such a large influx of people,” he said. “On the other hand, it was really, really sweet and really beautiful to see so many different people, so many different ages, representing so many different geographies … just to see everyone in one space, united and experiencing something together.”
After the services continued for several days, Brown called a meeting with other campus leaders to discuss if they were willing to expend the resources needed to support the growing gathering. They agreed they wanted to nurture it but also ensure there was a “horizon,” an eventual return to the routine functioning of the university and town.
As the chapel filled with strangers, administrators set a staggered schedule where some prayer services were reserved for high school and college students. Students were also given first dibs on some of the chapel seating during services open to the public. Meanwhile, university leaders designated an auditorium on campus as a quiet place students could go to relax, study and escape the fray.
Faculty members were given leeway to decide if they wanted to excuse students from class. Some students bounced back and forth between classes and the chapel, while others stayed there day and night, with permission from instructors.
Brown noted that the decision not to cancel classes or mandate class attendance had an ideological message for students—that there shouldn’t be a “false distinction” between class as a place for intellectual growth and chapel as a place for spiritual growth.
“We believe those spaces are more porous,” he said. “The classroom, equally, can be a place that there can be a kind of spiritual development occurring as well.”
The outpouring was arguably a disruption to students’ academic routines, but Brown also saw the event as a natural outgrowth of the Christian education Asbury offers.
Even though hosting a revival-turned-pilgrimage wasn’t an intended part of the university’s mission, “I see this as a kind of outcome of our identity,” he said.
Amanda Staggenborg, chief communications officer at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, said she was moved by such a public display of faith among students. She said one of the benefits of attending a Christian college is these institutions encourage religious expression in a way secular campuses do not.
“I think it allows them to be free in their faith,” she said. “That’s one of the beauties of Christian campuses is they are so faith filled, unapologetically faith filled.”
She also doesn’t rule out that news of the outpouring could attract new students to Christian colleges.
“It definitely raises the profile of Christian colleges because it’s received so much attention,” she said.
The Asbury revival drew support from across the country, but it also had its critics and skeptics.
Some onlookers questioned whether it was a flash-in-the-pan moment or will turn into a bigger movement. Others questioned the point of the revival and whether it will lead to meaningful, long-term changes when worshippers go back to their church communities at a time of polarized politics and calls for racial justice.
Some Black pastors and preachers have also had robust discussions about it on social media, with some arguing that a true revival would involve an explicit push for social justice and racial equity and others praising the event and the diversity of those who participated on the predominantly white campus.
“God is sovereign,” Dwight McKissic, senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arkansas, tweeted. “He sends awakening wherever He chooses. The Asbury Revival currently underway in Wilmore, Ky. should not be criticized on the basis of the people or racial group that’s in the majority there.”
Revivals, which first took hold in the United States in the mid-1700s, are gatherings that can be either “manufactured or spontaneous,” with a goal “to bring people closer to God” in a lasting way and create social change, said Christina Littlefield, associate professor of communication and religion at Pepperdine University, a Christian university in Los Angeles.
“People who experience this, this should fuel who they are for years to come, and generally when we think of fruits of the spirit, we think joy and peace and kindness,” she said. “It’s how you act. But we also generally want to see actual efforts to serve others, which is why you see, particularly on Twitter, a lot of people going, ‘Where’s the social justice work coming out of this?’”
Littlefield was initially among the skeptics of the gathering at Asbury. Some of her research focuses on how Christian nationalists have long called for a revival, and to them that means “being in charge and basically controlling all areas of culture and essentially reviving a Christian America in very conservative political terms of what that would look like.”
Against that backdrop, rumors of a revival put her on guard, she said. But ultimately she was heartened to see university leaders take pains to ensure students continued leading the gathering, and it wasn’t co-opted by outsiders, including Christian nationalists.
Students just “felt God’s presence, they kept praying, it kept going, and it spread,” she said.
Littlefield became convinced of the genuine nature of the event and was moved by it, though she and others believe onlookers won’t know if this is a revival until some kind of long-lasting social change comes out of it.
Yamada is similarly taking a “wait-and-see approach.”
“If we’re looking at the past history of revivals, there is social implications that will kind of emerge from the individual movement,” he said.
He doesn’t know what those social implications might look like, but he has hopes.
“Whether it’s about the disparities in economic class or the challenges of racism and racism in the United States and how those have really kind of reached a boiling point in many places over the last several years, the ways in which our political lives are kind of polarized along these kinds of lines … I would just hope that revival would lead to some kind of inbreaking of the Holy Spirit into those divides to bring about reconciliation and justice and peace,” he said.
Brown said the outpouring has drawn skepticism, particularly among people who have had negative experiences with religion or seen churches try to “manufacture a revival-type event,” which evokes a sense of “spiritual and emotional manipulation.”
“That’s not what Christianity should be,” he said. And that’s not what he believes he and others witnessed on campus.
Now that the gathering has ended at Asbury, he believes students need time to process what happened. He’s interested in eventually sending students who want to share their reflections to speak at other campuses, schools and church communities.
Campus leaders are still thinking through “how do we process that experience with them?” he said. “And how do we think about what’s next with them?”
The California Community Colleges system Board of Governors selected Sonya Christian as the new chancellor to lead the 116-college system, according to an announcement Thursday. Many campus and faculty leaders predicted she was the frontrunner.
Christian, currently the chancellor of the Kern Community College District, will be the first woman and first person of South Asian descent to be appointed the permanent chancellor of the system. She previously served as president of Bakersfield College and began her higher education career as a math professor. She assumes her new position on June 1, and interim chancellor Daisy Gonzales will continue to serve in the role in the meantime.
“I am honored to be selected to lead the most important system of higher education in the country and grateful to the Board of Governors for their confidence,” Christian said in a press release. “We continue to face many challenges, but I truly believe our greatest challenges enable us to do our greatest work. We are called to design the most vibrant, resilient, and effective learning environment ever. We are called do this work at scale, not eventually, but now. And we will work with a shared vision that keeps students first."
Her selection has received celebratory responses.
Governor Gavin Newsom praised her selection in the release, calling Christian “one of our nation’s most dynamic college leaders.”
Michele Siqueiros, president of the Campaign for College Opportunity, a California-based research and advocacy organization, said in a statement that Christian, who serves on the group’s board, is “an absolute win for students.”
Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges, said Christian was an “obvious choice” for the Board of Governors, given her dedication to the Vision for Success, a strategic plan for the system set in 2017.
“Dr. Christian has been dedicated to advancing student success and opportunities for economic mobility during her tenure at the Kern Community College District,” Brill-Wynkoop said in a statement. “She deeply understands community colleges’ critical role in providing accessible, affordable, and high-quality education to California students. We look forward to working with her to support our students, faculty, and staff.”
A number of financial disincentives deter colleges from smoothly transferring students’ course credits from one institution to another, according to a new white paper by the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board (PAB), a group of experts dedicated to transforming the transfer process.
The paper, released Thursday, concludes that improving the transfer process has been hampered by short-term thinking by campus leaders concerned about how allowing credits to transfer into their institutions affects their revenues. Colleges also have overly cumbersome, expensive processes for evaluating students’ past credits and are often subject to state funding models that do little to encourage better practices.
Lara Couturier, a principal at Sova, a higher ed consulting firm that facilitates the advisory board, and lead author of the paper, said students face all kinds of barriers to transfer, but “there was a huge conversation that wasn’t yet happening, which is what are the true incentives for colleges and universities to actually accept and apply transfer credit to student completion? How can we really think about influencing institutional behavior?”
She believes financial factors play a “huge role” in how college leaders craft transfer policies and processes.
“The way that the business model is currently structured leads to financial disincentives to really do good work on transfer, and we’ve got to find solutions for that,” she added.
Marty Alvarado, an advisory board member and executive vice chancellor for equitable student learning, experience and impact for the California Community College system, said many of the conversations campus leaders have about improving transfer focus on adding student supports and advising, but she believes the more campus leaders focus on student supports alone, “the more we continue to re-enforce this paradigm that the issue with transfer is a result of the students’ capacity or lack of capacity. And that’s a false narrative.”
“The strength of transfer is really grounded in the structures that are in place within four-year institutions and community colleges and whether or not we are benefiting from the transfer pipeline and the transfer processes,” she said. “There’s a huge element of self-preservation in all the ways that transfer has been approached.”
The paper suggests that the default approach at many colleges is to reject credits in part because campus leaders think it costs them to do otherwise. It notes that transfer students with unaccepted course credits need to retake classes, which creates immediate tuition revenue for colleges and universities—a financial gain in the eyes of administrators. But the paper argues that students who transfer with fewer accepted credits are more likely to drop out before graduating, which means students ultimately take fewer courses and colleges receive less tuition revenue over time. Lower persistence and completion rates can also hurt colleges’ reputations and result in lower state funding in areas with performance-based funding formulas, the paper says.
Alexandra W. Logue, a member of the advisory board, said people are psychologically hardwired to want to take care of their immediate needs first, rather than think long term. She believes this dynamic is exacerbated at colleges with unstable budgets and at a time when campus presidents are serving shorter tenures.
“If you are worried about having enough money for your institution, or if you’re thinking you want a new job at a better place, you want to do something that has an impact now,” said Logue, who is also a research professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Education of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “That’s a problem, because there are a lot of things, and transfer is one of them, where it takes years to see the fruits of your labor.”
She noted that basing these decisions on financial incentives might be an “unconscious” choice for some leaders, but the result is the same: a harder transfer process for students.
Colleges also tend to have cumbersome evaluation processes to determine which credits are counted from one institution to another, according to the paper. It cites the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), which found that fewer than a quarter of institutions share transcripts with each other electronically, even though doing so would speed up the transfer process and cut costs for colleges. Meanwhile, only about half of colleges and universities nationwide have “automated articulation rules,” which govern which credits count and are automatically applied. More than 30 percent of institutions have no articulation rules at all, meaning each course on a student’s transcript is individually evaluated. The paper notes that multiple faculty and staff members are often involved in these evaluation processes, a drain on employees’ time and on institutional resources.
Couturier noted that, even though it costs institutions and students, “there remains an assumption that every credit that a student comes to an institution with must be interrogated and proven worthy.”
“Until we can change that default mind-set, we’ll continue to see current student outcomes and current policies and practices,” she added.
Alvarado said she believes colleges misinterpret “academic rigor” as needing to weed people out and that contributes to these complicated credit evaluation processes.
“We have to give up our belief that there are individuals who are trying to get something they don’t deserve,” she said. “And that’s really fundamentally what’s underneath this that is problematic. Institutions are not trying to streamline this and maximize the amount of credit that individuals receive coming into their institutions, because there are financial disincentives and core beliefs that people don’t either deserve it, belong there and/or are trying to get something for nothing.”
The paper also puts some of the onus on state lawmakers for not doing enough to encourage progress. It notes that state funding models generally offer little incentive to colleges and universities to better serve transfer students. Most states don’t have funding formulas that reward institutions for taking transfer students or accepting their credits, and few formulas incentivize both two-year and four-year institutions to prioritize equitable outcomes for transfer students. Research by HCM Strategists, an education consulting firm, cited in the paper, found that just 12 states reward two-year institutions, two states reward four-year universities and four states reward both types of institutions based on their transfer rates or transfer student outcomes. The paper also notes that community colleges are underfunded and may not have the resources to provide adequate supports to help students transfer.
“The underlying business model for institutions, including the level and orientation of funding provided by the state, runs counter to supporting strong transfer and prior learning policies for students,” Martha Snyder, postsecondary managing director at HCM Strategists, said in the paper.
The paper offers a number of suggestions to campus leaders, including calculating how much increasing the number of transfer students, and the credits they come in with, can benefit them in the long run. It recommends a tool called TransferBOOST, which helps colleges assess how much transfers could increase enrollment, the costs associated with improving supports for these students and the potential returns of increasing enrollment, retention and completion rates through transfer. The paper also offers suggestions for using technology to make the credit-evaluation process speedier, less burdensome for institutions and more transparent to students, among other recommendations.
One of the goals of the paper is to get campus leaders to “actually crunch the numbers, look at what it would mean if we served transfer students better” and see the potential financial benefits for themselves, especially at a time when many institutions are “really strapped for enrollments,” Couturier said.
Logue emphasized that financial incentives for colleges to improve transfer processes, or a lack thereof, have deep effects on the lives of students who are often juggling other priorities, such as working and caring for children and other family members.
When credits don’t transfer, students “don’t finish,” she said. “They don’t get their degrees … and it’s not right.” Students are often maintaining a “very difficult balance,” and colleges shouldn’t be creating more obstacles to transfer and graduation.
“What you want to do is get them through with a high-quality education as efficiently as possible,” she said. “If they have to repeat courses, that is not the way to do it.”
A number of financial disincentives deter colleges from smoothly transferring students’ course credits from one institution to another, according to a new white paper by the Beyond Transfer Policy Advisory Board (PAB), a group of experts dedicated to transforming the transfer process.
The paper, released Thursday, concludes that improving the transfer process has been hampered by short-term thinking by campus leaders concerned about how allowing credits to transfer into their institutions affects their revenues. Colleges also have overly cumbersome, expensive processes for evaluating students’ past credits and are often subject to state funding models that do little to encourage better practices.
Lara Couturier, a principal at Sova, a higher ed consulting firm that facilitates the advisory board, and lead author of the paper, said students face all kinds of barriers to transfer, but “there was a huge conversation that wasn’t yet happening, which is what are the true incentives for colleges and universities to actually accept and apply transfer credit to student completion? How can we really think about influencing institutional behavior?”
She believes financial factors play a “huge role” in how college leaders craft transfer policies and processes.
“The way that the business model is currently structured leads to financial disincentives to really do good work on transfer, and we’ve got to find solutions for that,” she added.
Marty Alvarado, an advisory board member and executive vice chancellor for equitable student learning, experience and impact for the California Community College system, said many of the conversations campus leaders have about improving transfer focus on adding student supports and advising, but she believes the more campus leaders focus on student supports alone, “the more we continue to re-enforce this paradigm that the issue with transfer is a result of the students’ capacity or lack of capacity. And that’s a false narrative.”
“The strength of transfer is really grounded in the structures that are in place within four-year institutions and community colleges and whether or not we are benefiting from the transfer pipeline and the transfer processes,” she said. “There’s a huge element of self-preservation in all the ways that transfer has been approached.”
The paper suggests that the default approach at many colleges is to reject credits in part because campus leaders think it costs them to do otherwise. It notes that transfer students with unaccepted course credits need to retake classes, which creates immediate tuition revenue for colleges and universities—a financial gain in the eyes of administrators. But the paper argues that students who transfer with fewer accepted credits are more likely to drop out before graduating, which means students ultimately take fewer courses and colleges receive less tuition revenue over time. Lower persistence and completion rates can also hurt colleges’ reputations and result in lower state funding in areas with performance-based funding formulas, the paper says.
Alexandra W. Logue, a member of the advisory board, said people are psychologically hardwired to want to take care of their immediate needs first, rather than think long term. She believes this dynamic is exacerbated at colleges with unstable budgets and at a time when campus presidents are serving shorter tenures.
“If you are worried about having enough money for your institution, or if you’re thinking you want a new job at a better place, you want to do something that has an impact now,” said Logue, who is also a research professor at the Center for Advanced Study in Education of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “That’s a problem, because there are a lot of things, and transfer is one of them, where it takes years to see the fruits of your labor.”
She noted that basing these decisions on financial incentives might be an “unconscious” choice for some leaders, but the result is the same: a harder transfer process for students.
Colleges also tend to have cumbersome evaluation processes to determine which credits are counted from one institution to another, according to the paper. It cites the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), which found that fewer than a quarter of institutions share transcripts with each other electronically, even though doing so would speed up the transfer process and cut costs for colleges. Meanwhile, only about half of colleges and universities nationwide have “automated articulation rules,” which govern which credits count and are automatically applied. More than 30 percent of institutions have no articulation rules at all, meaning each course on a student’s transcript is individually evaluated. The paper notes that multiple faculty and staff members are often involved in these evaluation processes, a drain on employees’ time and on institutional resources.
Couturier noted that, even though it costs institutions and students, “there remains an assumption that every credit that a student comes to an institution with must be interrogated and proven worthy.”
“Until we can change that default mind-set, we’ll continue to see current student outcomes and current policies and practices,” she added.
Alvarado said she believes colleges misinterpret “academic rigor” as needing to weed people out and that contributes to these complicated credit evaluation processes.
“We have to give up our belief that there are individuals who are trying to get something they don’t deserve,” she said. “And that’s really fundamentally what’s underneath this that is problematic. Institutions are not trying to streamline this and maximize the amount of credit that individuals receive coming into their institutions, because there are financial disincentives and core beliefs that people don’t either deserve it, belong there and/or are trying to get something for nothing.”
The paper also puts some of the onus on state lawmakers for not doing enough to encourage progress. It notes that state funding models generally offer little incentive to colleges and universities to better serve transfer students. Most states don’t have funding formulas that reward institutions for taking transfer students or accepting their credits, and few formulas incentivize both two-year and four-year institutions to prioritize equitable outcomes for transfer students. Research by HCM Strategists, an education consulting firm, cited in the paper, found that just 12 states reward two-year institutions, two states reward four-year universities and four states reward both types of institutions based on their transfer rates or transfer student outcomes. The paper also notes that community colleges are underfunded and may not have the resources to provide adequate supports to help students transfer.
“The underlying business model for institutions, including the level and orientation of funding provided by the state, runs counter to supporting strong transfer and prior learning policies for students,” Martha Snyder, postsecondary managing director at HCM Strategists, said in the paper.
The paper offers a number of suggestions to campus leaders, including calculating how much increasing the number of transfer students, and the credits they come in with, can benefit them in the long run. It recommends a tool called TransferBOOST, which helps colleges assess how much transfers could increase enrollment, the costs associated with improving supports for these students and the potential returns of increasing enrollment, retention and completion rates through transfer. The paper also offers suggestions for using technology to make the credit-evaluation process speedier, less burdensome for institutions and more transparent to students, among other recommendations.
One of the goals of the paper is to get campus leaders to “actually crunch the numbers, look at what it would mean if we served transfer students better” and see the potential financial benefits for themselves, especially at a time when many institutions are “really strapped for enrollments,” Couturier said.
Logue emphasized that financial incentives for colleges to improve transfer processes, or a lack thereof, have deep effects on the lives of students who are often juggling other priorities, such as working and caring for children and other family members.
When credits don’t transfer, students “don’t finish,” she said. “They don’t get their degrees … and it’s not right.” Students are often maintaining a “very difficult balance,” and colleges shouldn’t be creating more obstacles to transfer and graduation.
“What you want to do is get them through with a high-quality education as efficiently as possible,” she said. “If they have to repeat courses, that is not the way to do it.”
The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, an organization focused on cultivating investigative reporters and editors of color, is now going to be based at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, according to a news release from Morehouse.
The organization was co-founded by a number of big names in journalism, including Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, famous for her work on The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which focused on Black Americans’ contributions to U.S. history. The Ida B. Wells Society was formerly based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones rejected a faculty position in 2021 after the Board of Trustees dragged its feet on offering her a tenured position, despite widespread support from academics. She took a position at Howard University instead.
The organization’s move to Morehouse was made official at an on-campus ceremony Thursday, which was attended by Hannah-Jones and Ron Nixon, vice president of news and head of investigations, enterprise, partnerships and grants at the Associated Press. The move comes not long after the college’s journalism and sports program became an official major in July of 2021 in which students can earn a bachelor’s degree from the department of Journalism in Sports, Culture and Social Justice.
The Ida B. Wells Society will help to teach Morehouse journalism students how to conduct interviews, find data, fact-check stories, pitch article ideas, use relevant technology and take advantage of open records laws. The organization will also host guest lectures and offer career development opportunities on campus.
Hannah-Jones said she was “very excited” Morehouse would be the organization’s new home.
“This partnership helps our young organization settle more deeply into our mission, which is to increase the number of investigative reporters of color,” Hannah-Jones said in the release. “Being located on the campus of a historically Black college located in Atlanta in proximity to other HBCUs and coming to Morehouse just as it gets its journalism major off the ground provides a tremendous opportunity for us to increase our impact on the field and society.”
The Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, an organization focused on cultivating investigative reporters and editors of color, is now going to be based at Morehouse College, a historically Black college in Atlanta, according to a news release from Morehouse.
The organization was co-founded by a number of big names in journalism, including Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, famous for her work on The New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which focused on Black Americans’ contributions to U.S. history. The Ida B. Wells Society was formerly based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where Hannah-Jones rejected a faculty position in 2021 after the Board of Trustees dragged its feet on offering her a tenured position, despite widespread support from academics. She took a position at Howard University instead.
The organization’s move to Morehouse was made official at an on-campus ceremony Thursday, which was attended by Hannah-Jones and Ron Nixon, vice president of news and head of investigations, enterprise, partnerships and grants at the Associated Press. The move comes not long after the college’s journalism and sports program became an official major in July of 2021 in which students can earn a bachelor’s degree from the department of Journalism in Sports, Culture and Social Justice.
The Ida B. Wells Society will help to teach Morehouse journalism students how to conduct interviews, find data, fact-check stories, pitch article ideas, use relevant technology and take advantage of open records laws. The organization will also host guest lectures and offer career development opportunities on campus.
Hannah-Jones said she was “very excited” Morehouse would be the organization’s new home.
“This partnership helps our young organization settle more deeply into our mission, which is to increase the number of investigative reporters of color,” Hannah-Jones said in the release. “Being located on the campus of a historically Black college located in Atlanta in proximity to other HBCUs and coming to Morehouse just as it gets its journalism major off the ground provides a tremendous opportunity for us to increase our impact on the field and society.”
The University of Denver is investigating a spate of reported antisemitic incidents on campus over the last two weeks.
Denver University Hillel, a Jewish student organization, said in an Instagram post that mezuzahs, Jewish ritual objects traditionally placed on doorposts, were “taken down and defiled” from the doorposts of three students living in campus housing, and one student had “pork products glued to their door.”
University officials denounced the incidents.
“We want to be very clear that these acts are NOT acceptable within DU’s community, and acknowledge the harm that has been caused to members of our community,” Todd Adams, vice chancellor of student affairs and inclusive excellence, wrote in a message to the student body, released Tuesday.
Chancellor Jeremy Haefner shared an update Thursday saying that the University of Denver’s Campus Safety Department determined the incidents were hate crimes under the Clery Act, which requires colleges and universities to record and report crimes that happen on campus. The campus Office of Equal Opportunity and Title IX is also investigating the acts. The university plans to offer educational programming about antisemitism, and Haefner encouraged students to attend a Shabbat event co-hosted by Jewish student organizations and the university today “to come together and reaffirm our commitment to peace and to each other.”
“In the wake of moments like these—moments that shake a community’s trust—the effects are deeply felt by those who share the identity of those targeted,” Haefner wrote. “It is also felt by those who know and love those individuals and by everyone working each day for a better, kinder world. Let us cling firmly not only to our ideals but also to the knowledge that this moment does not reflect who we are or who we want to be.”
A Georgia Senate committee released a new report on the needs of the state’s 10 historically Black colleges and universities and shared recommendations to better support the institutions at a press conference at the state capitol on Thursday.
“This is an opportunity for Georgia to become the nation’s leader in how states fully support HBCUs and maximize their economic and social impact for their graduates and surrounding communities,” State Senator Sonya Halpern, chair of the State Senate’s Study Committee on Excellence, Innovation and Technology, said in a press release.
The report is based on testimony given by HBCU leaders and advocates and business leaders before the committee last summer and fall. It offers a series of suggestions to state lawmakers, including creating a bipartisan HBCU caucus with members of the State Senate and House and HBCU subcommittees in the higher education committees of both chambers. The report also recommends biennial reports by an independent party on state agencies’ support for HBCUs.
Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, an organization that promotes education for Black and low-income families, praised the recommendations. The foundation was among the HBCU advocates that participated in an initial hearing of the committee in August.
“HBCUs play a vital role in Georgia and many southern states as centers of learning, community, and opportunity,” Pierce said in the release. “These recommendations set a new, ambitious agenda for how the state of Georgia can help HBCUs thrive even more, benefiting students and communities across the state and setting an example for many other states to follow.”
A Georgia Senate committee released a new report on the needs of the state’s 10 historically Black colleges and universities and shared recommendations to better support the institutions at a press conference at the state capitol on Thursday.
“This is an opportunity for Georgia to become the nation’s leader in how states fully support HBCUs and maximize their economic and social impact for their graduates and surrounding communities,” State Senator Sonya Halpern, chair of the State Senate’s Study Committee on Excellence, Innovation and Technology, said in a press release.
The report is based on testimony given by HBCU leaders and advocates and business leaders before the committee last summer and fall. It offers a series of suggestions to state lawmakers, including creating a bipartisan HBCU caucus with members of the State Senate and House and HBCU subcommittees in the higher education committees of both chambers. The report also recommends biennial reports by an independent party on state agencies’ support for HBCUs.
Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation, an organization that promotes education for Black and low-income families, praised the recommendations. The foundation was among the HBCU advocates that participated in an initial hearing of the committee in August.
“HBCUs play a vital role in Georgia and many southern states as centers of learning, community, and opportunity,” Pierce said in the release. “These recommendations set a new, ambitious agenda for how the state of Georgia can help HBCUs thrive even more, benefiting students and communities across the state and setting an example for many other states to follow.”
Scholars in Florida are angry, disappointed and divided over a recent joint statement, signed by Florida College System presidents, promising to “not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts.”
Some professors saw the statement as a baffling and infuriating capitulation to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who’s made no secret of his plans to purge the teaching of critical race theory—or anything that may be mistaken for critical race theory—from Florida public education. Other parsed the statement’s subtleties, noting the presidents’ careful language used to describe their plan to continue doing what they’ve always done—teach, not compel “belief”—while still appeasing the DeSantis administration. Some observers sympathized with the presidents as they try to navigate a state political climate increasingly hostile to parts of their mission—and with state funding hanging in the balance.
The presidents, who released the statement last month, represent 28 state colleges in the Florida College System, including those that predominantly offer two-year degrees and workforce training programs.
John Avendano, president of Florida State College of Jacksonville, presented the statement on behalf of the system’s Council of Presidents at a Florida Board of Education meeting. The group pledged in the statement to ensure efforts at their colleges “do not promote any ideology that suppresses intellectual and academic freedom, freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and the pursuit of truth in teaching and learning.”
The statement also said that critical race theory—a once-obscure, now widely politicized academic concept that racism is systemic and structural—will only be taught “as one of several theories and in an objective manner.” The presidents gave themselves until Feb. 1 to have “fully evaluated and removed any institutional instruction, training and policies opposed to the forms of discrimination described” in the statement.
A press release from the governor’s office celebrated the move, calling it a rejection of the “progressivist higher education indoctrination agenda” and a commitment “to removing all woke positions and ideologies” by February.
Some faculty members were incensed.
Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said the statement fails to "defend academic freedom or challenge the false narrative put forth by DeSantis and others that discussing important topics in the classroom is somehow akin to indoctrination."
“They’ve simply said they are ok with political interference in higher education in Florida because they did not wish to displease the governor,” she said in an email. “It would appear that they are showing they are willing to fall in line with draconian state control of higher education at the expense of the mission of the higher education institutions they oversee.”
Bruce Strouble, an adjunct professor at Tallahassee Community College and Florida A&M University for over a decade, said he was “outraged” by the statement. He teaches African American studies and history, among other courses.
He doesn’t believe all the presidents who signed the statement truly support it, but their action nonetheless left him feeling “like I was under attack, personally, because this is something I utilize in my educational practice,” he said. “Pretty much every course that I work in is influenced by critical race analysis of social issues.”
He’s worried by the “nebulousness” of the recent statement. Even if it says he can teach critical race theory alongside others, he and his colleagues aren’t convinced they’re protected from being penalized. They’re already wringing their hands over what they can and can’t teach, especially those who have dual-enrollment students and don’t know whether they have to contend with restrictions for K-12 schooling as well, he said.
Strouble, however, doesn’t plan to change his teaching.
Students are “free to decide” if they want to use critical race theory in their own research, he said. But “we shouldn’t be hiding different ways of approaching and analyzing data from students. That’s anti-education.”
The controversial pledge by campus leaders comes at a time when DeSantis is waging an unsubtle war against what he sees as a liberal agenda at the state’s colleges and universities. He dropped a series of bombshells about his proposed reforms for higher ed at a press conference Tuesday, including plans to defund diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at state public universities. He also lamented bloated “DEI bureaucracies,” the use of diversity statements in hiring and the prevalence of campus diversity trainings.
A press release describing his proposed legislation to come said it will prohibit “higher education institutions from using any funding, regardless of source, to support DEI, CRT and other discriminatory initiatives.”
These announcements were the latest in a torrent of shake-ups to Florida higher education by state lawmakers. The 13-member Board of Trustees at New College of Florida, including six trustees appointed by DeSantis, also ousted the college’s president Tuesday as a step toward their stated vision of making the liberal arts college more like Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution in Michigan. Meanwhile, the DeSantis administration called on public universities last week to submit all expenditures related to DEI initiatives. The Stop WOKE Act, which limits how instructors can discuss race and gender in public colleges and K-12 schools, was also signed into law by DeSantis last year, although its application to higher ed has been halted by a temporary injunction. Similar legislation, called “divisive concepts” laws, has proliferated across the country in recent years.
Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, said the Florida college presidents seem to have caved to “political bullying” and written their statement “under duress.” But as far as he’s concerned, they still voluntarily chose to issue what amounts to a “gag order” on their own campuses, despite the fact that Florida’s divisive concepts law is on hold for colleges.
“This is the only instance we’ve ever seen of an educational institution formally agreeing to restrict itself in some of the ways of the most restrictive laws aimed at higher education have done in Florida and in other states,” he said. “These college presidents are agreeing to something they’re not required to do by law at all, at least not by a law that is currently enforced.”
Eric Scarffe, an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida International University, said he’s not entirely surprised presidents of “chronically underfunded colleges” felt a need to “mirror back” some of the language state lawmakers are using in their rhetoric.
Presidents “are looking at their budgets and are trying as hard as they can to get a little bit more money from the legislature in order to provide our students, my colleagues, our fellow Floridians with top-notch, affordable education,” said Scarffe, who is also vice president of the United Faculty of Florida chapter at his university. Presidents likely feel like “you either fall in line or you get run over.”
He also believes campus leaders took pains to use specific wording that “didn’t commit to doing anything anyone would find objectionable,” since colleges already don’t compel anyone to adopt “belief” in academic concepts taught in classrooms. Nonetheless, he sees the statement and the “larger attack on higher ed” in the state causing “self-censorship” among professors afraid to lose their jobs.
“When you take a step back and look at all the different fronts the battle is being waged on, what you come to understand is they’re trying to exhaust us,” he said. “They’re trying to wage as many battles as they can on as many fronts as they can so that we just get tired. But we’re not going to get tired, because it’s too important to get tired.”
Young noted that the language used in the presidents’ statement echoes the intentionally vague wording in some of the divisive concepts laws in other states, such as Idaho and South Dakota. Presidents might think “they pulled one over on the governor” and agreed to much less than he’d hoped, he said. But these kinds of restrictions, no matter how vague, make faculty members afraid to teach certain subjects. He highlighted a new report by the RAND Corporation, which found that a quarter of K-12 teachers changed their curriculum or practices because of limits on how to discuss race and gender. Black teachers disproportionately were the ones changing their teaching.
A chilling effect on diversity work, spurred by political rhetoric in the state, appears to already be taking hold at some community colleges. For example, Valencia College canceled optional professional development courses related to diversity for faculty members this spring to avoid running afoul of the law, The Orlando Sentinel reported. The college’s student body is 42 percent Hispanic and 17 percent Black, according to fall 2021 data from the college.
Young, of PEN America, said the statement from Florida College System presidents is “demoralizing” news for Florida professors and students but also campus leaders across the country.
“Our hope is that college leaders and system leaders will band together to oppose this kind of legislation,” he said. “I think it’s disheartening to every president at every public university in the country to see this happen … It does break down the solidarity that is needed across institutions to resist this kind of legislation.”
Scholars in Florida are angry, disappointed and divided over a recent joint statement, signed by Florida College System presidents, promising to “not fund or support any institutional practice, policy, or academic requirement that compels belief in critical race theory or related concepts.”
Some professors saw the statement as a baffling and infuriating capitulation to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who’s made no secret of his plans to purge the teaching of critical race theory—or anything that may be mistaken for critical race theory—from Florida public education. Other parsed the statement’s subtleties, noting the presidents’ careful language used to describe their plan to continue doing what they’ve always done—teach, not compel “belief”—while still appeasing the DeSantis administration. Some observers sympathized with the presidents as they try to navigate a state political climate increasingly hostile to parts of their mission—and with state funding hanging in the balance.
The presidents, who released the statement last month, represent 28 state colleges in the Florida College System, including those that predominantly offer two-year degrees and workforce training programs.
John Avendano, president of Florida State College of Jacksonville, presented the statement on behalf of the system’s Council of Presidents at a Florida Board of Education meeting. The group pledged in the statement to ensure efforts at their colleges “do not promote any ideology that suppresses intellectual and academic freedom, freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, and the pursuit of truth in teaching and learning.”
The statement also said that critical race theory—a once-obscure, now widely politicized academic concept that racism is systemic and structural—will only be taught “as one of several theories and in an objective manner.” The presidents gave themselves until Feb. 1 to have “fully evaluated and removed any institutional instruction, training and policies opposed to the forms of discrimination described” in the statement.
A press release from the governor’s office celebrated the move, calling it a rejection of the “progressivist higher education indoctrination agenda” and a commitment “to removing all woke positions and ideologies” by February.
Some faculty members were incensed.
Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, said the statement fails to "defend academic freedom or challenge the false narrative put forth by DeSantis and others that discussing important topics in the classroom is somehow akin to indoctrination."
“They’ve simply said they are ok with political interference in higher education in Florida because they did not wish to displease the governor,” she said in an email. “It would appear that they are showing they are willing to fall in line with draconian state control of higher education at the expense of the mission of the higher education institutions they oversee.”
Bruce Strouble, an adjunct professor at Tallahassee Community College and Florida A&M University for over a decade, said he was “outraged” by the statement. He teaches African American studies and history, among other courses.
He doesn’t believe all the presidents who signed the statement truly support it, but their action nonetheless left him feeling “like I was under attack, personally, because this is something I utilize in my educational practice,” he said. “Pretty much every course that I work in is influenced by critical race analysis of social issues.”
He’s worried by the “nebulousness” of the recent statement. Even if it says he can teach critical race theory alongside others, he and his colleagues aren’t convinced they’re protected from being penalized. They’re already wringing their hands over what they can and can’t teach, especially those who have dual-enrollment students and don’t know whether they have to contend with restrictions for K-12 schooling as well, he said.
Strouble, however, doesn’t plan to change his teaching.
Students are “free to decide” if they want to use critical race theory in their own research, he said. But “we shouldn’t be hiding different ways of approaching and analyzing data from students. That’s anti-education.”
The controversial pledge by campus leaders comes at a time when DeSantis is waging an unsubtle war against what he sees as a liberal agenda at the state’s colleges and universities. He dropped a series of bombshells about his proposed reforms for higher ed at a press conference Tuesday, including plans to defund diversity, equity and inclusion efforts at state public universities. He also lamented bloated “DEI bureaucracies,” the use of diversity statements in hiring and the prevalence of campus diversity trainings.
A press release describing his proposed legislation to come said it will prohibit “higher education institutions from using any funding, regardless of source, to support DEI, CRT and other discriminatory initiatives.”
These announcements were the latest in a torrent of shake-ups to Florida higher education by state lawmakers. The 13-member Board of Trustees at New College of Florida, including six trustees appointed by DeSantis, also ousted the college’s president Tuesday as a step toward their stated vision of making the liberal arts college more like Hillsdale College, a private Christian institution in Michigan. Meanwhile, the DeSantis administration called on public universities last week to submit all expenditures related to DEI initiatives. The Stop WOKE Act, which limits how instructors can discuss race and gender in public colleges and K-12 schools, was also signed into law by DeSantis last year, although its application to higher ed has been halted by a temporary injunction. Similar legislation, called “divisive concepts” laws, has proliferated across the country in recent years.
Jeremy Young, senior manager of free expression and education at PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, said the Florida college presidents seem to have caved to “political bullying” and written their statement “under duress.” But as far as he’s concerned, they still voluntarily chose to issue what amounts to a “gag order” on their own campuses, despite the fact that Florida’s divisive concepts law is on hold for colleges.
“This is the only instance we’ve ever seen of an educational institution formally agreeing to restrict itself in some of the ways of the most restrictive laws aimed at higher education have done in Florida and in other states,” he said. “These college presidents are agreeing to something they’re not required to do by law at all, at least not by a law that is currently enforced.”
Eric Scarffe, an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida International University, said he’s not entirely surprised presidents of “chronically underfunded colleges” felt a need to “mirror back” some of the language state lawmakers are using in their rhetoric.
Presidents “are looking at their budgets and are trying as hard as they can to get a little bit more money from the legislature in order to provide our students, my colleagues, our fellow Floridians with top-notch, affordable education,” said Scarffe, who is also vice president of the United Faculty of Florida chapter at his university. Presidents likely feel like “you either fall in line or you get run over.”
He also believes campus leaders took pains to use specific wording that “didn’t commit to doing anything anyone would find objectionable,” since colleges already don’t compel anyone to adopt “belief” in academic concepts taught in classrooms. Nonetheless, he sees the statement and the “larger attack on higher ed” in the state causing “self-censorship” among professors afraid to lose their jobs.
“When you take a step back and look at all the different fronts the battle is being waged on, what you come to understand is they’re trying to exhaust us,” he said. “They’re trying to wage as many battles as they can on as many fronts as they can so that we just get tired. But we’re not going to get tired, because it’s too important to get tired.”
Young noted that the language used in the presidents’ statement echoes the intentionally vague wording in some of the divisive concepts laws in other states, such as Idaho and South Dakota. Presidents might think “they pulled one over on the governor” and agreed to much less than he’d hoped, he said. But these kinds of restrictions, no matter how vague, make faculty members afraid to teach certain subjects. He highlighted a new report by the RAND Corporation, which found that a quarter of K-12 teachers changed their curriculum or practices because of limits on how to discuss race and gender. Black teachers disproportionately were the ones changing their teaching.
A chilling effect on diversity work, spurred by political rhetoric in the state, appears to already be taking hold at some community colleges. For example, Valencia College canceled optional professional development courses related to diversity for faculty members this spring to avoid running afoul of the law, The Orlando Sentinel reported. The college’s student body is 42 percent Hispanic and 17 percent Black, according to fall 2021 data from the college.
Young, of PEN America, said the statement from Florida College System presidents is “demoralizing” news for Florida professors and students but also campus leaders across the country.
“Our hope is that college leaders and system leaders will band together to oppose this kind of legislation,” he said. “I think it’s disheartening to every president at every public university in the country to see this happen … It does break down the solidarity that is needed across institutions to resist this kind of legislation.”
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