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From: Rick Seltzer
Subject: Daily Briefing: Post-pandemic changes, Part 2
Good morning, and welcome to Friday, March 14. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch:
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Good morning, and welcome to Friday, March 14. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.
The Daily Briefing opened the week by examining what’s changed since campuses shuttered five years ago in the face of Covid-19. Let’s close it the same way.
Colleges face more budgetary questions, work-force concerns, and skepticism than they did before the pandemic. That’s according to reader responses and new pieces published since the Daily Briefing evaluated the landscape on Monday.
Financial fundamentals have eroded. This complements Monday’s case that higher ed has been on a financial roller coaster, but it’s a subtly different point. On Monday the Briefing wrote about outside forces making for a bumpy ride — a surge in emergency pandemic funding, followed by a hangover and now federal cuts. Readers have also identified forces coming from within the sector — rising first-year tuition-discount rates, proliferating new programs that are often not matched by cutbacks, surplus building space, concerns about administrative bloat, new barriers to international education, and tenure systems that have resisted reform until partisan politicians get involved.
Employees shoulder heavier workloads, especially those in student-facing offices. All too often, employees were given more responsibilities without more pay, time, or staffing to do the work. Services that were once offered only in person are now often hybrid. It’s a complex change requiring more training, coordination, supervision, reporting, and tech support.
Public health has been tarnished. It’s being privatized, Siddhartha Mukherjee recently argued in The New York Times. The early pandemic sparked a strong clinical, biomedical-research, and public-health response that developed Covid treatments and sought to protect vulnerable communities. But that spirit has faded, Adam Lauring, a professor of internal medicine and of microbiology, said in a news feature that the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor shared with the Daily Briefing.
Science became politicized. Claims about the origins of Covid, the necessity of social distancing, and the efficacy of vaccines were said to be supported by science when they were, in fact, “at best hasty improvisations,” Geoff Shullenberger argues in The Chronicle Review. Those who questioned the claims were ostracized at colleges and other knowledge-producing institutions, but now they’ve ascended to prominence and positions of governmental power, accelerating a reckoning.
The bigger picture: The above observations have in common a theme of eroding trust — trust in science, trust in health officials, trust in employers, and trust that institutions will continue to exist in perpetuity.
— Rob Bonta, attorney general of California
Twenty-one state attorneys general sued to stop cuts to the U.S. Department of Education. Their lawsuit, filed Thursday, argues that only Congress has the authority to eliminate the department. The Trump administration’s 50-percent work-force reduction, announced Tuesday, leaves the agency unable to perform legally required duties, the suit claims.
That’s how many North American colleges and universities were known to have adopted institutional-neutrality statements by the end of 2024, according to a report released this week by Heterodox Academy, a group advocating for open inquiry that supports neutrality statements. Just eight institutions were identified as having such policies before late 2023.
Institutions with neutrality statements enroll about 2.6 million students, the report says. That’s 15 percent of the student population across the United States and Canada.
Public colleges accounted for 78 percent of those with neutrality policies. About a third were research-intensive universities. In some cases the policies came in response to state legislation.
Nearly two-thirds of the policies barred institutions from taking positions on social or political issues, with the exception of cases when an institution’s mission is directly affected.
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Basketball fans are no doubt eagerly awaiting this Sunday, when NCAA tournament bids will be announced. Those more interested in academics and culture, on the other hand, are probably preparing for their annual rage against March Madness.
Don’t bust on all brackets just yet. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a conservative policy shop in North Carolina, is running a “Tournament of American Genius” as the country approaches its 250th birthday.
“By sparking a national conversation, the Martin Center aims to inspire a deeper appreciation for the ingenuity, creativity, and grit that make the nation a beacon of freedom and innovation,” says a description of the competition.
It’s a yearlong effort to find winners in eight categories: poetry; novels; speeches; documents, essays, and letters; art; music; engineering and architecture; and science.
The forthcoming debates about brutalist architecture should be fun to watch. But surely a ninth category is in order.
This country has produced extraordinary works of literature, oratory, art, engineering, and science that deserve recognition. Please, let’s not let them overshadow a field where we truly shine: marketing.
