It has not been a quiet year for higher education. Views essays that particularly struck a chord with readers in 2025 focused on topics including diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), artificial intelligence (AI), antisemitism, issues of college readiness or lack thereof, and, of course, the Trump administration.
Our most-viewed views piece was by Santa J. Ono, answering what was, at the time, the million-dollar question: why he’d want to trade the University of Michigan presidency for that of the University of Florida. In “Why I Chose the University of Florida,” Ono wrote of his decision to eliminate centralized DEI offices at Michigan in favor of “redirect[ing] resources toward academic support and merit-based achievement” and presented himself as in alignment with Florida’s Republican leadership in terms of its vision for higher education: “I put my name forward for this position because I agree with the state leadership’s vision and values for public higher education. My alignment is rooted in principles—like the renewed emphasis on merit, the strengthening of civics and foundational learning, and the belief that our universities should prepare students not just for careers, but for informed citizenship in a free society.” Of course, Florida’s Board of Governors in the end did not choose Ono, rejecting his appointment in the face of mounting right-wing criticism over his past support for DEI initiatives—but that was a news story for another day.
Our second-most read views piece, by Cynthia Stark, bore the stark headline: “How I Lost Faith in My University’s Mission.” Stark, in her 32nd year of teaching at the University of Utah, explained how pride in her faculty role had turned to grief and shame in the face of a wave of new state laws curtailing DEI initiatives, LGBTQ+ rights, and academic freedom, all on top of the stressors of dealing with “a crushing” burden of administrative work courtesy of an upper administration that “has instituted so many changes in such a short time it is hard to keep track.” Reflecting on her disillusionment in her various capacities as a faculty member, philosophy department chair, and parent of a queer, college-bound child, Stark ultimately asked who the “U” really refers to in the Office of Student Experience’s catchphrase, “U Belong.”
Rounding out the top three views pieces in terms of readership, Beth Kania-Gosche told higher ed what it did not want to hear: “The Enrollment Cliff Is Worse Than We Think.” A professor and chair of the education department at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Kania-Gosche cited sobering data about record-low math and reading scores of last year’s high school seniors, warning that “the enrollment cliff is actually much worse than higher education acknowledges if declining college-readiness scores are taken into account.”
Next in line comes Gary Wilder’s April essay, “The Case for Boycotting Columbia University.” In faulting Columbia for “capitulating to the Trump administration’s demands in a bid to restore $400 million in federal funding cuts,” Wilder, a professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, sought to defuse any concerns that might prevent readers from joining an academic boycott against Columbia, which he argued was no longer operating as a “normal and legitimate university” and had “colluded with the government’s project to destroy higher education and criminalize protest and dissent.” (Wilder’s op-ed found new readers after Columbia history professor and vice-dean Matthew Connelly linked to it in an op-ed in The New York Times arguing the case against an academic boycott.)
Number 5 was Robert Niebuhr’s “AI and Higher Ed: An Impending Collapse.” In the piece, Niebuhr, a historian and teaching professor at Arizona State University, envisioned the whole enterprise of higher education collapsing like a house of cards: “If students learn how to use AI to complete assignments and faculty use AI to design courses, assignments, and grade student work, then what is the value of higher education? How long until people dismiss the degree as an absurdly overpriced piece of paper? How long until that trickles down and influences our economic and cultural output? Simply put, can we afford a scenario where students pretend to learn and we pretend to teach them?”
In February, Austin Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College, penned, “Why Are Campuses Quiet and College Leaders Silent When U.S. Democracy Is in Crisis?”, critiquing the lack of visible protest on college campuses in the first weeks of the second Trump administration. The reasons Sarat identified were many: College leaders were preoccupied with responding to funding cuts and executive orders; many faculty felt vulnerable “because of who they are or what they teach”; students had many other things on their minds, some seeing Trump’s return as “just more of the same” even as others lived in outright fear. All of this is understandable, Sarat suggested. “But if all of us stay on the sidelines, the collective silence of higher education at a time when democracy is in crisis will not be judged kindly when the history of our era is written.”
The seventh-most read views essay of the year took on another crisis: “The Crisis of Trust in the Classroom.” “Folks,” Seth C. Bruggeman told his class after returning from Thanksgiving break, “I just can’t trust you anymore.” What follows is a meditation on academic misconduct, student motivation and, perhaps most surprising, students’ perceptions of their own poor reading skills. It is not only faculty who cannot trust; students, too, feel betrayed—by “professors who read from years-old PowerPoints” and by their “former teachers who assured them they were ready for college.” Bruggeman, a professor of history at Temple University, offered no easy answers, but described some of the challenges, hashed out with a group of his students, that stand in the way of rebuilding classroom trust.
In the essay in the #8 slot, “A Reflective Approach to Antisemitism Training,” Rachel Fish, a special adviser to the president at Brandeis University and co-founder of Boundless Israel, a nonprofit organization that supports Israel education and combats hatred of Jews, argued that antisemitism training will not succeed if it does not make room for deeper learning. Fish offered four pillars for how to do antisemitism training better, drawn from her work with college administrators: 1) ground the training “in a deep historical understanding”; 2) pair “intellectual grounding with practical tools and application,” 3) prioritize “deep and meaningful discussion over formulaic curricula or box-ticking”; and 4) broaden the focus to other issues, allowing trainings to serve “as a gateway to understanding other forms of bias and hate—both their similarities and their distinctions.”
In the #9 piece, OiYan Poon and Janelle Wong argued that “Asian Americans Got Played on Affirmative Action.” Poon and Wang, professors at the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Maryland, College Park, respectively, wrote that many Asian Americans were misled by the argument that race-conscious admissions benefitted Black, Latino and Native American students to their detriment. In point of fact, they argued, “As selective colleges and universities have released demographic summaries for the Class of 2028 in dribs and drabs, it has become clear that researchers’ warnings that ending race-conscious admissions could harm Asian Americans without significant benefits are coming true.”
Essays #10, #11 and #12 all dealt with DEI. Marjorie Hass, the president of the Council for Independent Colleges, counterintuitively argued that the Valentine’s Day “Dear Colleague” letter, which sought to declare all race-conscious campus programs illegal, in fact presented an opportunity for higher ed to focus on “the long-needed work of truly decentering whiteness as the normative identity and experience within so many campus curricula and co-curricular programs.” In her essay, “An Opportunity to Reframe the DEI Debate,” Hass laid down a gauntlet: “If we are to truly serve our students regardless of race, and if—as the department’s letter states—we have to put an end to even the subtle ways racial preferences and privileges are attached to seemingly race-blind policies, then watch out. Most campuses have a lot of work to do, and much of it is not going to be to the liking of those who believe that it is DEI programs that make an otherwise level playing field an unfair one.”
Also writing in February, Subini Annamma and David Stovall argued in “Standing Up to the New Segregationists” that universities seemed all too eager to comply with Trump executive orders and agency guidance (like the Dear Colleague letter above) that would seek to stamp out DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility) initiatives on campuses. “Even as we have been heartened to see some higher education groups sue the administration over its DEIA orders … we are horrified at some universities’ willingness to erase targeted communities in response to these dehumanizing actions by the executive branch. We believe this rush to comply is a sign that universities are willing to become an institutional wing of the new segregationists,” wrote Annamma and Stovall, professors at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Chicago, respectively.
Finally, in spot #12, Lane A. Glenn, president of Northern Essex Community College, argued “It’s Time to Turn the Page on DEI.” “If we take a moment to be honest with ourselves, we might recognize, as a growing number of Americans now seem to agree, that what began as a well-intentioned, principled movement toward equal rights for all more than half a century ago, one that I and other privileged liberals my age have considered ourselves allies to for most of our lives, has devolved into a dogmatic, antidemocratic, anti-intellectual power struggle that is causing tremendous damage to the reputations, enrollments, academic integrity and, quite possibly, futures of American higher education institutions,” Glenn wrote. Rather than double down on “a failing ideology,” Glenn argued that higher ed should embrace different, less divisive approaches for achieving greater inclusion and equity, such as those rooted in pluralism.
It’s been a year. To all our readers, get some rest this holiday season. Experience some joy.
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