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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.
A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.
Eight of the ten most politically diverse faculty bodies were at universities located in the U.S. South, a region where conservatives are more plentiful (the other two were Kansas State University and Brigham Young University). Meanwhile, four of the ten least intellectually diverse campuses were located on the West Coast, and four were Ivy League schools in the Northeast.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
America’s colleges have had a rough go of it in recent years. After the Great Recession sent students flooding back to campus, schools have faced one evolving crisis after another: COVID, government interference, protests, and the chaos of AI tools in the classroom. Despite some positive enrollment trends, schools are also staring down a very near future where there will simply be fewer 18-year-olds to fill their seats.
Is the purpose of college just to get a good job, or is there more to it? And though the nation’s colleges and universities have been in rough spots before, is it finally time to start rethinking their entire model? On this week’s Radio Atlantic, the Atlantic contributing writer Ian Bogost and I sift through the fraught landscape of American higher education.
