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Greetings from the summer solstice week in the Washington, DC area. We’re alternating between serious heat (not yet at French levels) and serious storms. The happiest beings here are plants. Today’s post is one of my semi-regular surveys of cuts to higher ed. I’ve been scanning for institutional closures, mergers, and staff/program cutbacks for several years. My goal is to collect evidence of such reductions, assembling them in one spot for public access and use. (Previous posts – from 2026:…
Just a quick post, friends. In the midst of a lot of other things going on I wanted to join today’s climate change awareness event. To explain: some of you may know about the climate or warming stripes visualization. Created by climate scientist Ed Hawkins (University of Reading), this information representation arranges vertical stripes in a horizontal sequence. The X axis is time; each stripe’s color indicates relative temperature compared with the previous one. As Wikipedia puts it, the…
Greetings from a sunny, steaming mid-Atlantic in June. I write this quickly, before a trip further south, where I’m keynoting the University of Central Florida’s Teaching and Learning with AI conference. I hope to share that speech on my AI newsletter. On this blog, there are a series of posts in the hopper, but today I wanted to quickly respond to a prominent column on higher education’s future. Jay Caspian Kang recently shared “Eight Predictions for the Future of Higher Education” and it’s a…
How is higher education enrollment changing, and what might it become in the future? These have been long-running interests of mine. Today the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center just released its updated spring 2026 data. In this post I’ll dig into it to highlight what I see as the leading points. Overall, many of the topline findings are quite positive. Total postsecondary enrollment in American higher ed grew by 1%, reaching 18.6 million. But there are interesting differences…
The end of spring term 2026 was marked by a sudden digital disaster across a large swath of higher education and K-12. A hacking group successfully struck Instructure, maker of the very popular Canvas learning management system*. It looks like ShinyHunters got into Instructure in early May, possibly April. I think the attack blew up on May 7, when the hackers posted ransom demands across Canvas instance. Instructure posted a maintenance message: By May 9th the system appears to be working…
Greetings from late spring in the Washington, DC area. It’s a lovely time here as temperatures rise high enough to be pleasant, and every plant is growing or blossoming. I’ve been working on this post for months, as winter gave way to spring. I was actually tempted to use the “April is the cruelest month” line as an introduction, but things just kept building up and pushing the post into May. Heck, this one’s already too long. Yes, today’s post is one of my semi-regular surveys of cuts to…
Colleges and universities should close teaching and learning centers because they threaten good teaching, That’s the argument of a recent Chronicle of Higher Education column, and I wanted to address it here. I’ll summarize the substance of “Why Pedagogy ‘Experts’ Are Wrong: In offloading pedagogical expertise to nonscholars, colleges degrade the classroom,” as it’s behind a paywall. Next I’ll share my negative reactions, followed my trying to take a more temperate stance. I’d really like to…
Greetings from Earth Day 2026. The holiday was first celebrated fifty-six years ago, back in 1970. I wanted to share some general thoughts at the global level, then some reflections on what this might mean for the academy. First, a vision of the Earth from the Artemis II mission earlier this month: From NASA: “Artemis II Captures the Terminator Line art002e000190 (April 2, 2026) – A view of Earth taken by NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman from one of the Orion spacecraft’s…
This is a quick note on one aspect of the Iran war’s impact on academia. It’s a brief post because I’m traveling for work this weekend. The usual caveats about trying to understand a fast-moving situation obscured by layers of … Continue reading →
How is the Iran war impacting higher education? What effects might unfold as the conflict continues? That was the subject of Thursday’s Future Trends Forum video discussion. We hosted three internationally-based experts to guide us: University World News journalist and … Continue reading →
