Take It or Leave It with Betsy Barre, Bryan Dewsbury, and Emily Donahoe

Higher education in the United States has been faced with some unique challenges in 2025, largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration. In this "Take It or Leave It" edition of the podcast, I invited three wise colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds that address ongoing challenges to the teaching missions of colleges and universities. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of the essays and the challenges they address is full of nuance and complexity.

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University; and Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. All three are experienced Take It or Leave It panelists, and I am very excited to have them back on the show.

Episode Resources

·       Betsy Barre’s website

·       Bryan Dewsbury’s website

·       Emily Donahoe’s Substack

·       Essay 1: Higher Ed Is Adrift, Kevin McClure, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2025

·       Essay 2: Institutional Neutrality Is a Copout, John Jenkins, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2025

·       Essay 3: Are You Ready for the AI University?, Scott Latham, April 8, 2025
 
 

Transcript

Derek Bruff: 0:00

Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Bruff. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time.

Derek Bruff: 0:21

Higher education in the United States has been faced with some unique challenges in 2025 largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration. Today on the podcast, we explore some ways that faculty and staff might respond to these challenges. It's time for another Take It or Leave It panel, where I invite wise colleagues on the show to discuss recent op-eds on teaching and learning in higher education. We tackle three op-eds in this panel, all of which address current challenges facing colleges and universities and their teaching missions. For each essay, we decide if we want to take it, that is agree with the central thesis of the essay, or leave it, that is disagree. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of each of the three essays is full of deep and, I think, useful discussion on teaching and learning here in the year 2025.

Derek Bruff: 1:12

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Betsy Barre, Assistant Provost and Executive Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University, Bryan Dewsbury, Associate Professor of Biology and Associate Director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University. And Emily Donahoe, Associate Director of Instructional Support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. All three are experienced take it or leave it panelists, and I'm very excited to have them back on the show. During the panel, you'll hear the titles, authors, and brief summaries of the three op-eds we discuss, That should be enough for you to follow along, but see the show notes for links to all three essays should you want to read them in their entirety.

Derek Bruff: 2:01

Hello, Betsy, Emily, and Bryan. Welcome back on the Intentional Teaching Podcast for another Take It or Leave It panel. I'm very excited to talk with all three of you today. Thanks for being here.

Betsy Barre: 2:11

Thank you. Glad to be back. Happy to be here.

Bryan Dewsbury: 2:13

Happy to see you again.

Derek Bruff: 2:15

So we'll jump right in. We have three essays to discuss as a panel. We're going to start with an essay called Higher Ed is Adrift by Kevin McClure. He's an associate professor of higher education at UNC Wilmington. And this was published in the Chronicle in late April 2025. And in the essay, he kind of surveys some of the pressures that are facing higher ed right now, largely as a result of the change in the US presidential administration back in January. And he details some specific pressures that we might get into. And one statement he says that may or may not be a thesis statement, but it's one that I'm gonna ask you to take or leave. He says, one of the defining features of working through this moment is feeling rudderless or adrift, feeling like our institutions have suddenly lost their sense of identity or direction. He, of course, says more in the article about that, and I'll put a link in the show notes. But Betsy, would you like to go first on this one? Are you going to take that or leave that?

Betsy Barre: 3:23

Thanks. So I very much appreciate take this essay, first of all. I think it's a beautiful essay and I encourage everyone who works in higher education or who cares about higher education to read it. I also take this particular statement that you've highlighted. While it's true that not everyone in higher education feels this way, I think it really captures well what many of us are feeling. As work that sits at the core of higher education is being attacked, we want to see a strong response from our institutions. But I think a lot of us are feeling like our institutions are not responding as we would want them to, whether that's because they're, quote unquote, capitulating, not directly resisting or remaining silent. were not happy. And then this makes us doubt whether they're really committed to their missions, whether they have the identity we thought they had. And then I also think it raises new anxieties for us as individuals about how we should be responding as individuals, both to the attacks themselves, but also how are we supposed to respond to our institutions? So how are we supposed to be thinking about this? And I think we're asking, what are the obligations of our institutions at this moment? And then what are the obligations of individuals who are working at these institutions. And there are no easy answers. And so I think that's why we feel a little rudderless or adrift. So I think one piece of advice that I would give, one really important piece of advice that I would give is, if you can, is to try to find out as much as you can about what is going on behind closed doors at your institution. So given the current situation, there are often really good strategic reasons why our institutions are keeping things out of the public eye. the work they're doing. So if you really wanna get a sense of whether your institution is doing work to protect its mission and not just like its bottom line, which I think a lot of us think might be happening, I think it's not enough to just look at public statements. You need to see what's going on behind the scenes. And while it's true, most of us will never have access to the behind the scenes sort of board of trustees conversations or president's office conversations. Speaking personally, I've at least found that I've gotten sometimes enough information to sort of get a sense that our administrators are trying to do good work that is aligned with our mission and just having to make really, really difficult decisions. And that's given me at least a little bit of hope in this moment.

Derek Bruff: 5:49

I like that advice that maybe there are ways that you can find out what's going on behind closed doors. Those may not be your usual channels of information that you would like to use, but... But some back channeling might, as you said, give you a little bit of more confidence that something useful is being done.

Betsy Barre: 6:09

And let me just follow up and say, too, I think one of the challenges for those who are making decisions about public statements is that on the one hand, there is a reasonable concern that the more there are public statements, the more attention you're drawing to yourself. And so as they're weighing the moral... decisions they have to make about that. They might be thinking, let's err on the side of doing the work and not making public statements. But what I appreciated about this essay is it was also a reminder that another variable in the moral calculus is how this affects the employees on campus and how we feel about the work that we're doing. The work that we do is extremely challenging and hard. It takes a lot out of us. And many of us are willing to put forth a lot of effort because we feel a calling to this work that is aligned with our values and principles. And if we believe, maybe erroneously, that our institutions are only concerned about their survival, that can affect our ability to do the work. And so I think our leaders, I do not want to be a president or a provost in this moment. They have extremely challenging decisions to make, but I think recognizing that communicating with the community internally is just as important as what we're communicating externally is a really important outcome of this piece that I appreciated.

Emily Donahoe: 7:26

Yeah, this is the point that I wanted to make as well that, you know, transparency to the extent that people can be transparent in this moment is so important because I know there are a lot of things that are being done. But if I don't know what they are or what the strategy is or, you know, even if it's being done right. There's just such a sense of moral injury among people that I know and I'm working with. This is an emergency. We're in an emergency, and it feels like our institutions are not meeting the moment or standing up for their values. It feels like there's a lack of principled, courageous leadership. There's a sense of... cognitive dissonance where we're all coming into work and like sending our little emails while we feel like everything is collapsing all around us. I don't know if it's tried at this point to refer to like the dog meme where like the dog is in the house that's on fire and it's going like, this is fine. This is how I feel like everybody feels like this. And, you know, some people in some contexts are worried about their jobs. Am I going to have a job in six months? And so when you just when it's kind of radio silence from your institution, no matter if like maybe there is stuff going on behind the scenes. But if we don't know that. Right. I think it leads to a lot of, I think, short and long term damage for the employees at an institution and for the students at an institution. So I did like that this piece drew attention to that kind of sense of panic and despair that we're all having right now.

Derek Bruff: 9:02

Yeah. So it sounds like you're a take it as

Emily Donahoe: 9:06

Oh, right. I am. I am a take it. Although I did want to weigh in. Yeah, I take the piece in general. I did want to weigh in with a slightly different take on the closing metaphor, but maybe we'll get to that.

Derek Bruff: 9:18

Yeah, we'll come back to that.

Betsy Barre: 9:19

that's good. I have thoughts on that too.

Derek Bruff: 9:21

Yeah. I want to say one thing before I forget it. And then I want to hear Bryan's take it or leave it on this. Um. One complicating factor, I think, for some in terms of the radio silence they may be getting from their leaders is that if those leaders have... A lot depends on the history you have with the leader, right? Some leaders you can say, oh, they haven't said anything, but I know, I have some faith, I have some trust in them to be kind of pulling some levers behind the scenes. And other leaders, you don't have that, right? They haven't had that kind of communication or relationship in the past. And I will also say, The last, one of the last crises was the COVID pandemic. And I saw some of my institutional leaders step up in ways that I had never seen them do before. I was a little worried about some of the folks, I won't name names, but I was a little worried about some of the folks who were in charge at that time, but like they rose to the challenge. And so that's something I'm trying to keep in mind too, as I get the radio silence, there may be leaders that are actually kind of doing more than you might expect in this moment. Bryan, do you take this or leave it? Are we adrift? Have our leaders left us adrift?

Bryan Dewsbury: 10:34

I will take it-ish. Okay. I will take it-ish. I guess what I like about the article is I think it's a fairly factual description of what people are seeing on a visceral level, what you might find when you go on campuses. You know, I have... colleagues at some of the institutions that are being intentionally targeted. And when I text them, they use the words apocalyptic when they describe the feel on their campus. So I take this as an accurate, descriptive way of articulating what's happening right now. Where I apply the ish, and I really just got stuck on this part of the article, where he talks about, you know, whether we should have seen this coming or, you know, You know, were there some sort of warning signs that predicted this, right? And that's the part I think, quite frankly, kind of frustrates me because there were issues long before this. And what is happening in my view is we are getting encapsulated and overwhelmed and traumatized by the dystopian behaviors that are happening right now. And no bandwidth is being left out. to investigate what flaws in the way we did business before this that allowed this capitulation to happen so easily. And I'm saying this from a relative position of privilege in the sense that I've traveled to many, many campuses, seen several strategic plans, and in one of the places I've gone to and talked about, we believe in diversity, we believe in equity, and then I would ask the question, how are you measuring your impact? And it's crickets. The chickens are coming home to roost on that carelessness. If you didn't have a mechanism to defend your values when you were called upon to defend them, then you couldn't. And this is not me blaming the victim, but this is me saying it's not just about getting out of the rip current, and I know that's a metaphor at the end, but it's not just about getting out of the current. It's learning lessons so that you are not ill-prepared when the riptide hits you again. And That's the piece, and I think there's not enough bandwidth to be both adrift and feel dark and overwhelmed, while at the same time think of corrective measures, so I get that. But I worry there, and sometimes I really do, because as you know how much I value equity work and what it means for how we teach and things like that, but it has to be done right. And we can't we have to look at not just the research model, the teaching model, we have to look at the higher end model and ask ourselves how did we so decisively lose that communication battle? And so I take the description, right? But I need us to do more than just describe our pain. I really do. Yeah.

Derek Bruff: 13:36

Well, so I'm going to take it on this as well. And I do think that I liked how you framed it as the communication battle. I think it's a battle that higher ed has been losing for a while now, and we need to get much better at fighting that fight. And I think about the way that the term DEI has been used in our popular American discourse. it means everything and nothing all at once, right? And so we can't actually have conversations about what programs, what activities, what mechanisms, what problems are we really focusing on because this term has become this kind of umbrella boogeyman that can refer to some problematic practices, but it can also refer to some really important practices. And so the discourse kind of got away from us in higher ed. And one reason I thought of that is, so... I don't know if you all have looked at the Harvard website in the last month, but when they came out pushing back against the administration, they also did an entire redesign of their homepage. And it's all about telling the stories about the impact of the research that they do. And, you know, I don't know if storytelling... Like, I don't know how you actually get there and move the needle, but... But it's a good start, I think, to have those stories out there and available. And as you were saying, Bryan, it's stories we should have been telling better for years now. And

Bryan Dewsbury: 15:05

why did it take the federal government threatening your 501c3 status to tell that story? That's the question I want to answer. That's what I'm saying. So I'm glad it's there. I'm glad it's there. But we had to reflect on that. You had to ask yourself, why did it take that? to get you to realize the importance of telling that story.

Betsy Barre: 15:26

Well, Harvard's an interesting case though, right? In terms of the moral dilemmas we face. You know, it's pushing back where you know, it's suing because it thinks something is a request is unlawful. It's telling its story, but it also is changing the name of its office of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Like it's changed, you know, it's doing the things that people would say is in some ways are capitulating as well. And so it just shows that moral complexity of the decisions before us and what does it mean to resist and what is appropriate level of resistance, which maybe leads to the metaphor, the next metaphor that the, that the author draws at the end of the, of the piece.

Derek Bruff: 15:59

Yeah. Let's, let's go to that. Yeah. McClure writes near the end, if things are very not normal, he talks about this riptide, right, that maybe we don't need to be fighting against the riptide. If things, quote, if things are very not normal, perhaps it's time for all of us to paddle perpendicular to the prevailing flow and try out new ways of being and doing. Betsy, what do you make of that metaphor?

Betsy Barre: 16:23

Yeah. So I'm eager to hear Emily's critique of the metaphor and maybe Bryan's critique of the metaphor too. What I would say is the one thing that I didn't take from the essay is that I wanted to hear more about what that would look like. Because ultimately, that's the reason I think so many of us are feeling anxiety right now is that we have institutionally a concern about what does it mean to be courageous in this moment? What is the morally right thing to do in this moment? And it is not an easy decision. We also have individual anxiety about complicity. And so I think a lot of us are just sort of going through the motions, but then we're like, is that complicit in this wrongdoing? So how do we think about what our individual obligations are? And the reason it's so tough is because we can imagine just straight up resistance, right? Like that's the obvious, like this is wrong. I am full guns blazing, like completely resisting this. But most moral reasoning and analysis and sort of reflection on the complexities of most moral decisions suggest that actually sometimes that does more harm than good. So you can have like a pro tanto, this is wrong, but then on balance, maybe a certain decision is actually the right thing to do. And it actually could even be wrong, but still the right thing to do, right? So it even gets more complicated in that regard. And so I like the metaphor in that it suggests a kind of caution to About the straight up resistance and to think carefully, but I would love to, he didn't, I mean, as the end of his, of his essay, this nice essay of saying, let's think about, you know, swimming perpendicularly. What does that mean? And how do we figure out what that means and what the right thing to do is? So that, that's my thought. And I have more thoughts on that if you want to hear it, but that's my sort of critique, but sort of really enjoying that metaphor at the end as well.

Derek Bruff: 18:02

Emily, metaphors are in your domain for sure.

Emily Donahoe: 18:06

That's true. I'm not a philosopher or an ethicist like Betsy. And so I now I'm feeling like I have not maybe thought about the moral decisions in front of us quite as deeply. But I'm also kind of I think I'm also much more likely to be like pro radical resistance. The reason that I don't like the metaphor Yeah. is because I think it suggests, so the idea is that if we swim against the currents, right, we're gonna kind of wear ourselves out. And so we have to kind of find ways of swimming kind of perpendicular to the current. But the underlying assumption here is that we're kind of all in our own individual little boats, right? And like, what if we were all in one big boat and then we could all like paddle against the current together and then maybe get somewhere. So like, I realized that a lot of people maybe do feel like they're in their own individual boats and maybe are in certain institutional or departmental contexts, right? Maybe they're, you know, they feel like they're acting alone and they can do things like they can not comply in advance or they can choose issues to be a squeaky wheel about, you know, in every meeting, like bringing up these things that are important to them. But that's kind of all they feel like they can do. But I think like we could choose to maybe all get in a big boat if we're in a place to do that, right? And that might look like joining your campus union. We have United Campus Workers here or your AAUP chapter or like starting a chapter. It might be like getting involved in faculty senate or working with your senate to try to form a mutual defense compact with other institutions because a lot of those are happening. It might even just be like convening with colleagues to strategize and hear kind of what are other people in other departments doing. I mean, we're so siloed. at our institutions and even I work at a center where we're supposed to have contact with all of these different people across campus. And even I don't know what's happening in a lot of places, right? But I've found it so helpful at this moment to hear from colleagues like, hey, what's going on in your department with your grant funding? Or like, what's going on? Like, what is your response to our new legislation? What have you heard from university leadership, right? What are they telling you? How can we like get together, share information, find out what's happening? in other corners of the institution, other corners of the state, and collectively kind of decide how can we respond to this together, right? And I think the more information we share and the more kind of collective work we can do, the more successful we're going to be at fending off those attacks. I mean, I think we can swim against the current, but it requires everybody to do it.

Derek Bruff: 20:59

Brian?

Bryan Dewsbury: 21:02

You know, I think it's almost a little unfair to the author to take this or leave this without hearing his articulation of what he means by it, which is what I think both Betsy and Emily are saying. So I want to grant him that right, right? But I do agree, particularly with Emily's comments about, you know, who's doing the resisting and how is that resistance structured, right? And part of the success, I think, of this dystopian moment is it essentially called our bluff, right? It essentially identified that typically people aren't in the same boat and, you know, you can sort of pick people off one at a time or pick universities off one at a time and count on the fact that the resistance will be scattered and piecemeal and maybe in some cases ineffective. Now, I'm saying that acknowledging that there is resistance happening. I'm aware of it. I'm on top of it as much as I can. So I applaud that. And so this is not a zero-sum game. I think the thing I would want people to think about with respect to resistance is take a look at history and maybe some other examples of where a federal entity tried to control higher ed. And maybe recognize that what's happening now didn't just come out of the blue. If you want to look at Hungary as a case study, as a recent case study, this is not by accident. And so I guess the part of the metaphor I worry about with swimming in perpendicular, it has a feel of accommodation and trying to, that's when you get into the, like, if you could change your language, if you could do this, if you just say yes to this request. And Colombia is finding out the hard way that when you do a Munich Agreement version of a higher-end request, right, you keep changing the goalposts until you get completely destroyed. So it's, as Betsy says, tricky, right? There's good decisions, bad decisions. What seems right may not be the right thing. But, you know, and maybe I just grew up reading too many dystopian novels, but I honestly worry about the endpoint. I honestly do. I think we're well past the point where comparing it to some other even darker times is superfluous and careless. I think we're in a place where we really have to start thinking about how far is too much. I'll say one more thing, and this sort of comes under the umbrella of calling more bluff. Years ago, I read a book called Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, and I know there's some issues with him, but that aside. One of the things that kind of stuck with me with what you were saying in that book is that in capitalist systems, people's professional behavior are fully oriented to how you compensate, right? So in case of higher ed, if you're a research faculty, you will focus all your attention on your lab and papers because nobody cares about your teaching because your papers are going to get you 10. That's just one example, right? So when you want to think about the perceived spinelessness of maybe some faculties, The thing to ask yourself is not whether that person is brave or not brave. The thing you have to ask yourself is what are the levels that allow other people to have power over them, right? And the levels are the economic levels, right? Once you are able to do things that control the compensation package, then it's a lot easier for them to capitulate and heal, right? And that's one of the, I guess, you know, in terms of like how we handle reptiles and things like that is... you know, is there an ecosystem in the future that you can design where it's not so easy for a place to come and just sweep people away, right? Where there's more agency in faculty life, where there's more independence, where there's less of an ability for somebody to just snuff out, you know, 40% of a division of a federal funding agency. So, I mean, that's a long conversation, but I think it's hard to discuss the metaphor without thinking about the levels above it.

Derek Bruff: 25:15

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. There's the kind of individual swimming we do, but then there's the collective swimming we might do with our own communities, but there's the kind of organizational instructional changes that could happen as well at much higher levels. Betsy?

Betsy Barre: 25:34

Did you, Derek, want to comment on this before I have a follow-up?

Derek Bruff: 25:38

Mine is a little ridiculous. I like the perpendicular part. I feel like sometimes... We do get in our lanes and our little silos and we don't think creatively enough about the kind of options that we have. The other metaphor I went to was the old Godzilla movies where Godzilla is coming down the street and all the citizens are running in front of him trying to outrun Godzilla. When if they just went one block west, they would be out of his path and they would be fine. Right. So like, I, I, I appreciate the admonition to say, let's take a minute and kind of put our heads up above the scene and see if there are some other options we haven't thought about.

Betsy Barre: 26:22

Yeah. And I think that's a, a charitable read. I mean, cause you could imagine this like swimming perpendicular is just like avoid the issue. It's avoidance. Right. Or, and I really appreciate Emily's point about the, there are things we can do together. And I would argue that's a kind of perpendicular creativity too. So again, we're interpreting this metaphor in somewhat different ways.

Derek Bruff: 26:41

Well, and to his credit, in that same paragraph earlier, he says, our best bet is to care for and rely on each other, which I see as a kind of call for mutual aid, not unlike what Emily was describing.

Betsy Barre: 26:52

Yes. And I would say, so I've been, to speak to some of Bryan's point and also to Emily's and Derek, what you just said, I've been reading a lot about two moral issues in sort of the field of philosophy and ethics lately, because it's just been related to this. First is the nature of courage and what courage requires of us and what is the virtue of courage. But at the same time, I've also been reading a lot of moral philosophy about complicity. and the moral status of complicity and compromise. And so one book I recommend that I'm reading right now is by Lepora and Goodin called On Complicity and Compromise. The book is really good and the argument is really good about saying that there's lots of different kinds and levels of complicity and there's different moral responsibility associated with that. And we need to think through the various features of that moral decision and that it's not either you're resisting or you're complicit. It's not that you're courageous or you're not. There's a lot of space in the middle that we have to figure out. And it's really, really hard. And I think that requires us to ask, you know, when do we need to take risks? Right. I think it's really important. A lot of times I think it's very easy. And our lawyers, this is really important. Their job, our general counsel, their job is to reduce risk. They're doing their job when they're saying, you know, being preemptively compliant, for example, because that's the best way to reduce risk is we're just going to just any possible way that we could be under threat. We're going to avoid that. So obviously, I think that we could be, our institutions, I think, could be more willing to take risks on behalf of the things that are essentially important to us. So we have to ask the question, when should we be willing to take risks? And then we have to also ask, what is it okay for us to risk? Right? Are we risking the existence of the institution? And sometimes we may be. And that's an even like, you know, as much as we want to deny, like, no, if we just fight together, it'll be great, but maybe not. And so when should we take risks? What are we resisting? All of these things, just super difficult. And I think the more that we can talk to one another together, the better I think we'll feel about, we'll still feel rudderless and anxious and, you know, but maybe we'll feel that we're trying to do this together in a thoughtful way and not be as complicit.

Derek Bruff: 29:02

So I'm going to segue to our second essay. You just mentioned our institutional values, which is a big part of this second one. This one is from January of 2025, which feels like a whole nother era in some ways. This one is called Institutional Neutrality is a Cop-Out. It's by John Jenkins, President Emeritus of Notre Dame University, where Emily has a deep connection. So I'm going to read a little bit longer of a quote from this article. But first, it's an essay about institutional neutrality. Right. Which there's a long history of what that term means. And you can read some of that in the essay. Right. But essentially, it boils down to institutions, institutions not taking positions on on controversial topics, even if individuals within those institutions may be allowed to. Right. So that's kind of the space that we're in. And John Jenkins argues, as the title says, institutional neutrality is a cop out. He's not in favor of it. And he writes, but by encouraging the study and discussion of ethics across the disciplines, facilitating conversations and reflection around moral questions and life's purpose, and when needed, challenging and being open to challenge when behavior falls short. In this endeavor, it is essential to articulate institutional values and the implications that flow from them. I'm going to go to you, Emily, first. There's a lot in that passage. I heard it as... So one way to take it or leave it would be to say, if we want our students to grow morally as well as intellectually, then is it then essential to articulate institutional values?

Emily Donahoe: 31:06

Yeah, so I have some things to say about this. As you said, I have a deep connection to Notre Dame, did my graduate education there. I'm gonna take this take on its face But I have pretty deep reservations about kind of what lies beneath it. So I from my time at Notre Dame, I was at Notre Dame when Father Jenkins was there. And so I have some sense of how this philosophy might have applied in practice. So I agree broadly that. all institutions have publicly articulated missions, which means that they have values that are implicitly or explicitly stated that are associated with that mission. And it would be ludicrous to pretend like those values don't exist in a political context and don't have political implications. I mean, increasingly it's political to even say that people should be able to have access to and attend higher education to study the liberal arts, et cetera, right? So, I mean, even articulating a commitment to neutrality is a political position. Like that's a political commitment. I mean, you could think of Desmond Tutu on this point and the idea that neutrality almost always benefits the status quo and almost always benefits the oppressor, right? So I think arguably universities shouldn't be partisan in the sense that they align themselves with a particular political party, but the suggestion that they should be politically neutral is not really in line with reality. Like by articulating missions and values, they're already articulating political commitments. So I agree with this take kind of in the abstract. And I will say that as So Notre Dame obviously is a deeply Catholic institution. I'm not Catholic, and I have pretty left-leaning political commitments. But even as a person like that at Notre Dame, I really admired their general commitment to stating their values, even when I disagreed with a lot of those values, because at least we kind of knew where we were, right? I knew what the institution thought and stood for. But I really have to wonder, if the choices that Notre Dame makes and other universities make about which particular issues to take a stand on are not more determined by like financial interests than an actual moral commitment. Like in Notre Dame's case, by what is or isn't gonna anger a body of largely Catholic donors and alumni, just frankly, right? So like, For example, when one of Notre Dame's faculty members wrote a pro-choice op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, Father Jenkins personally wrote a letter to the editor of that paper to condemn the op-ed and say that it didn't represent Notre Dame's views and values, which is a way of making a clear commitment to their values. But the university did not make any statements or comments make any moves to condemn the death threats and the harassment that this faculty member received over those views on abortion, right? Sometimes from Notre Dame's own students. So like one assumes that that kind of harassment is also in conflict with the university's values, but they don't say anything about that, right? And I think you could point to a lot of things. I mean, similarly, the university made a statement last year condemning, sorry, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, which seems to be in line with their commitment to to Catholic social teaching, right? But it also arrested 17 of its students for trespassing when they were conducting a peaceful nonviolent protest on the quad. And as they're like hauling these students away in handcuffs, one of them calls out, I'm being arrested for following Catholic social teaching, right? Like these students were in, some of them were in the peace studies program at Notre Dame. And they said that they were living out values that they learned and that they're reinforced at Notre Dame. So I don't know. One reaction I have is that you can talk all you want to about the importance of like rejecting neutrality, but it doesn't really mean anything if your actual actions don't align with the views that you express in press releases. But even if we're like scaling back thinking on a more fundamental level, right? Even if we're only talking about whether or not you're issuing statements, right? Notre Dame still missed a lot of opportunities to like uphold their stated values by failing to stand up for the most vulnerable people at their institution and beyond. So I guess my question is like, what is Father Jenkins even talking about here? Like most universities, Notre Dame, I mean, this is just the way it is. They take moral stances on things that it benefits them to take moral stances on, and then they refuse to take stances when it doesn't benefit them. And this op-ed is like a dressed up attempt to justify those choices. So I agree that universities shouldn't be neutral, but I'm deeply cynical about the motivations that underlie this piece.

Derek Bruff: 36:02

Bryan, do you take this or leave it?

Bryan Dewsbury: 36:06

Well, first I want to thank Emily for that inside baseball because that's a pretty interesting perspective. I think it kind of, I mean, yeah, no, sorry. There's a theme here with me.

Derek Bruff: 36:26

It's an artificial binary. You must choose one.

Bryan Dewsbury: 36:29

It's hard for me to do that I know. I'm with Emily mostly in that, like, you know, just is the substance of it. Like I, I, I agree. There's some cop out. There's a big cop out piece in it. Um, I felt the argument could have been more strongly made. I guess here, here's my take. Um, And I'm reflecting back on what Betsy was saying earlier about the last topic in that, you know, it doesn't have to be complicity or resistance. It doesn't have to be either or. And I feel there's a similar carelessness that happens when these conversations come up where there's either neutrality or the activist. And it's like, well, no, there's actually a lot of space in between the two. Right. And a lot of space in between the two. So to give just a really specific example, right, I teach intro bio, one of the classes I teach. And, you know, in that class, I talk about the men from Tuskegee study. I talk about, you know, Latinos who were sterilized in California in the 20s and 30s. So I talk about really dark things that this is not activists. This is just me stating historical documented facts, right? Sometimes when the University of Chicago's talk about this marketplace of ideas stuff, I'm torn because on one hand, I'm very liberal in the sense that I love that. I love bringing ideas to a classroom and having a robust, respectful exchange. But I think a lot of times that that process gets conflated with expectations of good humanity, being good humans to each other, right? And if as an instructor, I do things to make students feel like they belong, make sure that they feel included, that they feel respected, I can do that and... place them in an environment where ideas are being challenged. Both can exist, right? But the problem is the former, you know, when people discuss the former, it gets thrown into this umbrella of you're being activists or it's DEI or it's not liberal critical thinking. It's like, no, no, I'm just actually not being an asshole. That's kind of what I'm going for here. I just want people to come here and be their best self and to do that. Research actually shows me what things will work. And that's where this argument kind of goes off the rails for me. It's like, how do you really want to have that debate, right? One of the things I love about higher ed is that marketplace of ideas, but one of the things I love about being in education and educational research is we try to figure out how to create environments where people can be fully present, engaging in that marketplace. And I don't see that discussed enough, but... Betsy, how do I interpret your argument?

Betsy Barre: 39:12

That's great. I love it. And can I go now, Derek? Is it okay? Go for it. I have a lot to say about this piece, but I have tried to condense my responses. I'm actually writing a piece in response to it because I think it's so interesting. So in terms of the binary, I still am like, if the binary is the way that Derek wrote the thesis, like that we need to be, we shouldn't be neutral. I'm actually maybe not taking it. But what I love about this piece, what I take is the idea that institutions are in the business of doing something more than just disseminating knowledge, that we are in the business of moral formation. But before I say why I like that, let me also just respond to the feedback that I the comments of Emily and Bryan that I thought were great, which is that, you know, I think a useful distinction is recognizing, yes, of course, neutrality is not a useful concept in some ways because, of course, nothing is ever fully neutral. And I appreciate that Jenkins sort of makes that point. But he does also say he uses the language of restraint. And I think that's the in-between, Bryan. You know, he's talking about it's like not you're not neutral or not, that maybe there are times when we should show restraint about institutional positions. And what's interesting, though, Emily, is I actually think I don't know if you caught this. It was kind of like a quick piece in the essay, but I'm really intrigued by it is the actually towards the end is like, well, there are times when we should show restraint and his argument for when the institution should show restraint is fundamentally pragmatic, like when it's going to hurt the institution. So he's actually articulating the thing that you're saying we shouldn't be

Emily Donahoe: 40:45

So what is the point of standing up for your values?

Betsy Barre: 40:49

Right. So it's this interesting case where it's like, okay, well, sometimes we don't stand up for our values if it's going to hurt the institution. But otherwise, we can just be full-throated. And actually, what I would want to make the argument for is a principled case for restraint and tied to moral formation. So this is my general take, right, is that I think what I appreciate about this passage also that Derek chose that he read is that I appreciate that Jenkins says we're in the business of moral formation. What I appreciate about this passage and my general take on moral formation is that a lot of people think about moral formation as like, we're gonna give you a bunch of rules and we're gonna hold you accountable to those rules. So we believe you can't do A, B, C, D and E. And if you do those things, we're gonna punish you. But in fact, like that's not the way that moral formation actually works, right? And he notes that by he wants to encourage study and discussion of ethics across disciplines. He wants to facilitate conversation and reflection. And it's not about being told what's right and wrong. It's developing a capacity for understanding the details of a situation, weighing the competing values. And I think the thing that's most important for moral formation is being able to make moral choices. So if you're told what to do, You're not actually making a moral decision for what you're responsible for. Like you actually have to be able to make moral choices and fail and actually make wrong moral decisions to really develop morally. And so what we need, if we really take that kind of moral formation seriously, it's really important that we give students the freedom to make decisions. immoral decisions. I mean, it sounds kind of radical, but that's really important, that discussion. They need to encounter different moral perspectives and they need to feel free to make those choices. And so if you're at an institution that's just saying, well, we're not neutral, so here are all the 5,000 things about what we stand for and students have to comply, you're not actually engaged in moral formation. But, and this is the final thing I want to say, but I do think there is a resolution to this tension. So on the one hand, he's saying like, oh, we need to have this discussion and debate about ethics, but on the other hand, we should be stating moral principles. And I think the resolution is that the moral principles we should stand for and we should take risks for and that we say publicly and explicitly are the moral principles that create the conditions for freedom and freedom of expression and moral formation. So I think there are some moral issues that institutions should not take publicly, because especially if they're contested, But they have to and absolutely have to take a moral stand for creating the conditions for the possibility of that moral debate. Like that's really important for moral formation. And I think he doesn't distinguish that. And so he's just like, either we take more positions on whatever the heck we want. And then if it's pragmatically not helpful, we'll just stop standing for them. Whereas what I would like to see, and this is what I appreciate about Chicago sometimes, sometimes I don't like Chicago's statement, is that you would say what we stand for at bottom, and it's not neutral. is that we stand for creating an environment, and this goes back to Brian's point about inclusion, is that we stand for creating an environment where we can contest moral ideas so that that can ensure that students are developing morally and in a way that allows them to make choices and take responsibility for their behavior. So I'm sorry that was a lot long, but I think it's a really interesting piece and more for us to talk

Derek Bruff: 44:07

Yeah, yeah. I want to mention one example, and I share this not as an insider. I've never worked at or attended Berea College in Kentucky. But I know them by reputation. I've known colleagues who've worked there. And if you look on their website, it's very clear what their institutional values are. No tuition, a term they call impartial love, work to learn, and serving Appalachia. And to Emily's point, it's also very clear that they act on those moral values that they state. It's a very different kind of institution. There is no tuition, right? All the students have to work. It's inclusive in some really very concrete ways. And so we can't all be that college, right? But I think we can figure out what are the values of our college. And and work to implement those in very concrete, practical ways. And that's a theme I hear from all three of your comments, actually, is that it's not enough to just say the things, but you're going to have to kind of back that up in some practical ways.

Derek Bruff: 45:17

So our third essay is called Are You Ready for the AI University? It's by Scott Latham, a professor of strategy at UMass Lowell. he lays out a lot of predictions about how generative AI and related technologies might fundamentally change higher education. Over the next five years, I saw the number 2030 pop up a lot, which sounds like sci-fi, but is in fact five years from now. So I'm going to throw out, maybe we'll do a little lightning round here. So I'm going to throw out a few of the claims or predictions that he makes. And I want to know if you're going to take it or leave it. So one of them is, He talks about the idea that you can build an AI-taught course where there's not a human instructor, but an AI who is somehow guiding students through a set of materials and giving them feedback on their learning and such. He says, once the training wheels on this type of structure are off, AI-taught courses will become the dominant paradigm in higher ed. Bryan, do you take it or leave it? Y

Bryan Dewsbury: 46:31

I mostly take it.

Derek Bruff: 46:33

Oh.

Bryan Dewsbury: 46:34

And I blame growing up in the days of Terminator 1 2 3. I'm just saying, don't act like you don't know. Don't do that. You know what's up. You know Neo is coming. Here's the thing. Here's where I'm going to take it. I'm going to stand by my vote. Okay. The only caveat I'll give to that is I'm always a little wary with hyper-specific predictions of like, this is what's going to happen, you know, right? But I do have very close friends and colleagues who work in AI in Silicon Valley who know a lot more things than I know and who are more privy to the advances than most of the public knows. And some of the things they share with me, I have to tell you, is not nice. Well, I shouldn't say not nice, but a little skipped. And I think coupled with that, which I think is kind of a thread that runs through his article, is it is pretty clear to me that higher ed is not prepared for what this could be, right? And that to me is a whole other conversation. And I think that lack of preparation is what might then allow these kind of, doomsday scenarios, if I can call it that, to happen. I know some listeners might be like, yeah, it's the same thing about MOOCs. Yes, but also look at Hayden Christensen's theory of disruption. It doesn't always happen the first time. It chips away a little bit. I don't know there. I guess maybe the way I feel is I don't have good reason to believe that what is being articulated in the article is not a possibility. Okay. So in the interest of time, I'll stop there.

Derek Bruff: 48:22

Emily, I'm going to go to you next. AI taught courses will be the dominant paradigm in higher ed. Take it or leave it.

Emily Donahoe: 48:28

I'm going to leave it, but now I feel foolish bringing up MOOCs.

Derek Bruff: 48:32

That was in my notes too.

Emily Donahoe: 48:33

Well, okay. So, I mean, I think one of the threads that runs through the article is that, you know, this is what students want, right? Like this is what the market demands. I just don't think that's true. I mean... I can buy that students, maybe, maybe some students are so miserable in the current educational environment that we've created that they would literally rather talk to a robot all day. Maybe, I mean, I think that's totally plausible because frankly, a lot of our educational environments are pretty miserable. So I think that's possible, but I think if given, nobody actually wants to talk to a robot, right? If given the choice between a robot or chat bot or whatever, and like a compassionate, knowledgeable, attentive human teacher, I think people want to talk to humans, right? Like the reason that MOOCs did not take off, I think at root is because there's no human connection there, right? And even if a machine could perform every single function that a human teacher could perform, it would still not be effective because for most of us, relationships are the foundation of learning. And I don't think any technological innovation is gonna change that. And if teaching and learning is a kind of human driven endeavor has survived the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press the internet, I don't really see any reason why it won't survive generative AI.

Derek Bruff: 49:59

Betsy? Take it or leave it.

Betsy Barre: 50:00

I'm going to leave it for many of the reasons that Emily shared about relationships and humans being sort of complicated in their desires. I do think that it's different than MOOCs. So I agree with Bryan. I also think that it's possible for, it will be possible, maybe not now, but it will be possible for AI to do a number of the things that teachers do. But I also think there's just complicated human motivations, not just a desire to be in relationship with teachers, but I can also imagine a world in which it's like the boring apocalypse, you know, where like the students are just, the only thing they really care about is getting a degree and it's if that's the case, this whole business model of like, oh, it'll be so cheap for us to have AI, then they won't do the work. They won't learn anything. The companies won't want to hire them because they don't actually know what they're doing. And so I can see a crash moving in that direction too, that it just, I don't see a world in which students are of their own initiative going to use AI in a way that actually promotes this rigorous learning. Like there needs to be people involved to structure how they would use AI. Otherwise it's not actually going to be helpful for them. And so I, it seems implausible to me, but you know, Who knows? I agree with Bryan that it could happen, but I think it's plausible.

Emily Donahoe: 51:04

To be clear, I totally agree with Bryan that people are going to try this. A lot of institutions are going to want to try this. And I just don't think it's going to take off.

Derek Bruff: 51:17

He also says, I'm going to do a speed round on this too. I can think of no plausible scenario in which there will be an equal number of faculty members in 10 years as there are today. Betsy, take it or leave it.

Betsy Barre: 51:34

I leave it. I mean, I have sometimes made the argument that it might actually be, it might lead to a renewed commitment in the liberal arts because we see that we need to prepare our students for responding to the implications of AI and not just the recommitment to the liberal arts, but a thinking of, well, if it's just about having massive lectures where you have exams, of course AI could do that. But maybe what we need is actually that individual conversation, mentorship, et cetera, which requires more faculty. And not less. So I can imagine a world where now we require human beings to have some courage and moral commitment to go back to the other conversations. But I can imagine a world in which we would say, actually, the value of higher ed is precisely in the low student faculty ratio and how we fund that, you know, really complicated questions. But hey, if we have a universal basic income, because AI is doing all the work, maybe what we're doing is spending all of our money to have like individual tutors, but human tutors, and that would be amazing. So.

Derek Bruff: 52:32

Brian, fewer faculty members 10 years from now, take it or leave it.

Bryan Dewsbury: 52:38

I think I need your audience to know that in general, I'm usually an optimist, right? They need to know that. But on this particular topic, I don't feel the same. I take it. I agree with what Betsy is saying in principle. And I sincerely hope I'm wrong and she's right. That's sort of how I feel. That's what I would love to see, a recommitment to the liberal arts, a relationship-driven education. But what I feel like I am seeing are more universities closing at a higher rate in the last 10 years than ever, ever. What I am seeing is more people getting higher adjuncts. What I am seeing are tuition costs going up and students saying, I don't need to pay $85,000 a year just to be on a New England tiny college. I'm gonna go to, you know, University of X state for two, you know, that's what I am seeing. And that is a scenario that more fits a cost reduction model than it fits like less invest in more faculty. So I don't know, I'm gonna take it, but please, Brian, I hope you're wrong.

Derek Bruff: 53:46

Emily, are you gonna take this or leave it?

Emily Donahoe: 53:48

Yeah, I mean, this particular take I'm gonna take because, there wasn't a plausible scenario in which there was an equal number of faculty members in 10 years, like before AI, right? So, I mean-

Derek Bruff: 54:00

That was my take as well.

Emily Donahoe: 54:02

Yeah. What I don't take is the sense in this article that like all of this is inevitable, right? Like I like my colleague Marc Watkins has written about, he has a notion that like AI is unavoidable, but not inevitable, right? We can't ignore it. But we're not like slaves to Silicon Valley. We as a society, as higher education professionals can make choices about the world we want to create and the role we want AI to play in it. And hey, like maybe if we all got in the same boat and started paddling against the her together, we could exert some influence on how this goes down, right?

Betsy Barre: 54:36

Yeah, I was going to say, she's a literature professor. She knows how to bring it back, yeah. And where you start. It's great.

Derek Bruff: 54:43

Yes. Well, and that's a great place to end it. I will say this article is rather provocative. If I take anything, it was Bryan's point that there's more happening with AI than you might know about, and that it does deserve our attention. Because it is... unavoidable. So thank you all for being here today and being part of this conversation and sharing your perspectives on this. I hope our listeners have left with a more nuanced understanding of some of these issues and maybe a little bit of hope and things to try out in their work lives as we navigate the very challenging year of 2025. So thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it.

Betsy Barre: 55:23

Thank

Derek Bruff: 55:26

Thanks to our three Take It or Leave It panelists, Betsy Barre, Bryan Dewsbury, and Emily Donahoe, for sharing their perspectives on some very challenging topics. In the show notes for this episode, you'll find links to all the essays the panel took on and links to more information about each of our fantastic panelists. I would love to hear from you about today's panel. What perspectives would you take? Which ones would you leave? How are you navigating the current moment in higher ed? You can click the link in the show notes to send me a text message. Be sure to include your name so I know who you are. Or just email me at derek@derekbruff.org. Intentional Teaching is sponsored by UPCEA, the online and professional education association. In the show notes, you'll find a link to the UPCEA website where you can find out about their research, networking opportunities, and professional development offerings. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Bruff. See the show notes for links to my website and socials and to the Intentional Teaching newsletter, which goes out most weeks on Thursday or Friday. If you found this or any episode of Intentional Teaching useful, would you consider sharing it with a colleague? That would mean a lot. As always, thanks for listening.