Your Cart is Empty
Josh Moody
Inside Higher Ed
President Donald Trump’s skepticism of the current accreditation system bled into Tuesday’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity (NACIQI) meeting—the first since Education Secretary Linda McMahon and other officials were confirmed.
The Trump administration has cast accreditation as beset by alleged woke priorities, a theme repeated Tuesday along with pledges to shake up the system.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
Virginia Tech governing board member John Rocovich has refused to resign after Gov. Abigail Spanberger removed him last week after 16 years. Rocovich stated in a four-page letter addressed to the Secretary of the Commonwealth that he will not resign before his term ends on June 30, 2027. There was no sign of him at the board’s committee meetings on Monday in Blacksburg.
Spanberger’s decision is the latest effort by her administration to shake up governing boards at Virginia’s colleges and universities, amid concerns within the higher education community about the politicization of public university governing bodies. She recently appointed four new members to Tech’s governing board.
More than 1,100 University of California math and science professors are urging UC regents to reinstate college-entrance exams, saying that unprepared students are lowering academic standards and draining teaching resources.
The request, delivered in a two-page letter last week, cites a sharp decline in readiness among students studying science, technology, engineering and math. Nearly one-third of students taking first-semester calculus at UC Berkeley “displayed severe preparation deficits,” the letter said.
What would it take to open up a research field that has narrowed without anyone quite noticing? That sociology of knowledge question animated Jesse Smith’s presentation to the HxSociology virtual community. An assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University — one of the new civic-thought centers reshaping the institutional landscape of higher ed — Smith builds his case from four premises: that values irreducibly shape research, that they can distort inquiry when they harden into a closed paradigm, that sociology today operates under just such a progressive paradigm, and that closed paradigms only crack open when a competing paradigm, grounded in opposing values, offers genuine alternatives rather than mere critique.
