Ten Questions That Keep Me Up at Night | Inside Higher Ed

1.  Why do so many faculty members treat professional staff like servants?

2.  How can we preserve the intellectual integrity of public higher education in an era in which state political leaders increasingly want to control what is taught?

3. Does the widespread resistance to getting the COVID-19 vaccine reflect a massive failure of our educational system?

4. How can private colleges and universities develop truly diverse and inclusive student bodies if they are dependent, ultimately, on tuition, and thus must favor wealthy (and thus more often white) students in admission?

5. Can any part of Biden’s higher education agenda (debt relief, free community college, a major increase in Pell grants) pass our divided Congress at a time when politicians care more about short term election results than long term outcomes?

6. Is there any practical way to reverse the reliance of our higher education system on poorly paid adjunct faculty members?

7. Does the massive amount of venture capital funding flowing into alternative higher education technology and delivery projects indicate a market judgment that traditional higher education models are doomed, and if so, is this judgment correct?

8. Can colleges and universities adapt nimbly to a rapidly changing environment with sufficient agility when our shared governance model is designed to produce tension, stasis and preservation of the status quo?

9. Why do the number of humanities majors continue to drop when employers have stated, over and over, that they value above all the creativity and critical thinking capabilities that the humanities foster?

10. How can we teach our students that truth matters when we teach modern and post-modern texts that suggest that the concept of truth itself is meaningless?