What does America look like if the decline in Christian belief continues? What might this mean for higher education? I’ve been tracking this religious trend for a while (2021, 2019, 2017). Today I’d like to follow up with a new Pew study, which models several possible scenarios for American religious…

Yesterday I shared a simple framework for understanding how campuses may approach climate change. That post offered a few hypothetical examples. Today I’d like to add a real world example. Let’s start with the University of Texas-Austin. A Bloomberg report describes the institution as making a lot of money by…

How might academia grapple with the climate emergency over the next years and decades? Today I’d like to offer a simple schema to start conversations. Some of you know I’ve been research this topic for years (Universities on Fire is available for pre-order!). Now I want to share a quick…

Emporia State University has just fired a group of faculty members, including those on the tenure track. It’s the latest example of what I’ve called a queen sacrifice. (This occurs when a college or university cuts tenure-track faculty members. The source of the phrase is chess, where queens are the…

Several times academics have told me that climate change is “too futuristic” to discuss, in terms of how it impacts higher education. It no longer surprises me, but it is still interesting. I wish I could understand where that idea was coming from. Because reality is pretty darned futuristic now…

New patterns of remote work are appearing, as different nations rethink their COVID plans. What might they mean for higher education? To set the stage, let me share some data from Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom: This is early data for a rapidly developing situation, but let’s start from it…

Greetings from the United States holiday of Labor Day. I took a day off yesterday with my wife to explore Fredericksburg, a nearby Virginia city with interesting historical and general stuff. Being an America, I couldn’t take the day really off, and managed to work whenever I could: in the…

For years I’ve been researching and writing about the impact of climate change on higher education. This summer has brought global warming to the forefront; will academia take the crisis more seriously as a result? To recap from the past month: higher temperatures, too much water, and too little water…

Last night I held the first meeting of my Future of Higher Education seminar at Georgetown University. The students were awesome. Here I’d like to share some of the thinking behind the class design, as well as the syllabus. The topical goal is to explore the future of higher ed…