Newsletter
June 30, 2025
Tuition Hikes and Layoffs Are Coming to a Broad Set of Universities
Excerpt (links in the original, boldface added):
“Public universities in the Midwest are raising prices for out-of-state students, as Florida schools consider making the same move for the first time since 2012.
“Cornell and Duke are among the colleges weighing layoffs. The University of Minnesota is cutting hundreds of jobs, even as undergraduate tuition soars as much as 7.5 percent.
“Just as America’s colleges are preparing to welcome what could be the largest freshman class in the nation’s history, political and economic forces are unleashing havoc on higher education budgets. Schools are grappling with meager upticks in state support and topsy-turvy economic forecasts, and Republicans in Washington are pursuing federal budget cuts and threatening tax hikes...."
Full article at NY Times.
Stanford to Reduce Budget by $140 Million, Lay Off Employees for Next Academic Year
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
“Stanford announced Thursday that it will impose a $140 million budget cut for the 2025-26 academic year to adapt to reductions in federal research support and an increase in the endowment tax.
"President Donald Trump’s 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill,' passed May 22 by the House of Representatives, proposes a 21% increase on Stanford’s endowment tax from the current rate of 1.4%. The bill is currently undergoing negotiations in the Senate before being sent to the president’s office. If signed into law, the increase would represent a tax of $750 million annually, placing some financial aid -- over two-thirds of which comes from the endowment -- at risk....
“'There is significant uncertainty about how federal support for universities will evolve, but it is clear that the status quo has changed,' University president Jonathan Levin ’94 and Provost Jenny Martinez wrote in their announcement of the change.
"According to the letter, the budget cuts will require a reduction in staff positions, including through layoffs....
"The figure of $140 million excludes funding cuts for the School of Medicine, which will separately decide on reductions in the coming weeks....
“'In all the departments in the humanities and social sciences, in the natural sciences and engineering, in the medical school and elsewhere, the importance of that work is for the future of the country and the world,’ Martinez said. ‘The investment in education is for the long term benefit of society, and we really need to defend that.’”
Full article at Stanford Daily.
See also full text of Pres. Levin’s and Provost Martinez’ letter to faculty and staff, “Update on the 2025-26 Budget,” at Stanford Report.
See also our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage and our Stanford Concerns webpage.
More of Us Are Working in Big Bureaucratic Organizations than Ever Before
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
“Writing for the Harvard Business Review in 1988, Peter Drucker predicted that in 20 years the average organization would have slashed the number of management layers by half and shrunk its managerial ranks by two-thirds. Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out that way. Despite all of the hype around alternatives -- the gig economy, the sharing economy, holacracy, lean -- bureaucracy has been growing, not shrinking....
“While many CEOs decry bureaucracy, few can claim success in defeating it. In practice, tactical victories -- like cutting out a layer of management, trimming head office staff, or simplifying a cumbersome process -- are usually small and quickly reversed. In this regard, look again at Figure 1. Notice how rapidly the thicket of bureaucracy grew back after being pruned in the wake of the 2008 recession.
[Editor’s note: charts in the article are similar to the detailed charts at our Stanford Concerns webpage showing extraordinary growth of Stanford’s managerial staff in the past 20 years as compared to virtually no growth in the faculty or student body during those same years. Among other things, note that Stanford has the highest administrative costs per student ($40,227) of any U.S. college or university and as compared to MIT ($32,719), Yale ($22,461), USC ($18,170), Cornell ($9,329) and UCLA ($7,640).]
“It could be argued that in a world characterized by increasing complexity, the growth of bureaucracy is inevitable. Who but senior executives is going to address all those vexing new issues, like globalization, digitization, and social responsibility? Who else is going to meet all those new compliance requirements around diversity, risk mitigation and sustainability? This mindset has produced a surge in new C-level roles: Chief Analytics Officer, Chief Collaboration Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Ethics Officer, Chief Learning Officer, Chief Sustainability Officer and even Chief Happiness Officer. And more prosaically, who, if not managers, is going to do the everyday work of planning, prioritizing, allocating, reviewing, coordinating, controlling, scheduling, and rewarding?
“Yet our research suggests that bureaucracy is not inevitable; it’s not the inescapable price of doing business in a complicated world. Rather, it’s a cancer that eats away at economic productivity and organizational resilience.”
Full article by London School of Business Prof. Gary Hamel and management consultant Michele Zanini at Harvard Business Review (2016).
Behind Closed Doors, Harvard Officials Debate a Risky Truce with President Trump
Excerpt (boldface added):
. . . . .
“Unlike many other powerful institutions that have struck bargains with Mr. Trump, Harvard, the nation’s oldest and richest university, spent much of this spring as the vanguard of resistance to the White House, credited by academic leaders, alumni and pro-democracy activists for fighting the administration and serving as a formidable barrier against authoritarianism.
“Despite a series of legal wins against the administration, though, Harvard officials concluded in recent weeks that those victories alone might be insufficient to protect the university....”
Full article at NY Times.
Harvard Is Asking Corporations to Fill Its Federal Funding Gap
Excerpt (boldface added):
“Harvard University and other top research schools are seeking corporate funders to support their science labs following sweeping cuts to government grants.
“The T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard, which typically gets more than 70% of its annual research dollars from the federal government, lost nearly all of the funding after the Trump administration canceled hundreds of the university’s research grants and contracts. The school expected to get more than $200 million this fiscal year.
“Administrators called the losses catastrophic....”
Full article at WSJ.
ChatGPT May Be Eroding Critical Thinking Skills
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
“Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results.
“The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to write several SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and nothing at all, respectively.
“Researchers used an EEG to record the writers’ brain activity across 32 regions, and found that of the three groups, ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and 'consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.' Over the course of several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.
“The group that wrote essays using ChatGPT all delivered extremely similar essays that lacked original thought, relying on the same expressions and ideas. Two English teachers who assessed the essays called them largely 'soulless.' The EEGs revealed low executive control and attentional engagement. And by their third essay, many of the writers simply gave the prompt to ChatGPT and had it do almost all of the work.
“The brain-only group, conversely, showed the highest neural connectivity, especially in alpha, theta and delta bands, which are associated with creativity ideation, memory load, and semantic processing. Researchers found this group was more engaged and curious, and claimed ownership and expressed higher satisfaction with their essays."
Full article at Time.
See also “Does AI Make Us Stupid?" at Free Press.
Educators Must Adapt to AI, but They Need Help
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
“I recently had the opportunity to be part of an OpenAI faculty roundtable. I was one of about a dozen professors that were joined by several staff from OpenAI’s recently created ‘Education Team.’ We talked about our best practices for teaching with AI and our worries about its impact on student engagement, motivation, and academic integrity. The Education Team listened, asked questions, and presented their own vision of an ‘AI Native Institution.’
“Our conversations were all about isolated and idiosyncratic (and, sure, exemplary) pedagogical practices, but completely lacking in big-picture vision—as if all we had to do was better integrate some whiz-bang gadget one student, one faculty, one institution at a time.
“But the real story is that AI has broken the transmission model of education, where professors teach and then grade students on how much they learned. A passing grade used to mean students had learned enough of what the professor had 'transmitted.' No longer. These past two years faculty have given out A’s left and right to students who don’t understand (much less read) the assignment they just submitted. I cannot overstate this: AI has decoupled students’ performance (what they submit to us) and student knowledge.
“AI is not just another shiny new gadget. It is a paradigm-shifting technology. The rise of the printing press in medieval Europe fundamentally altered how people related to knowledge, sparking a centuries-long expansion of literacy and thus the democratization of knowledge. I believe AI is the printing press of our time, again expanding and democratizing the process of learning.
“All of us in higher education have long known that the transmission model was deeply flawed. But until ChatGPT was released in November of 2022, we had no viable alternatives. Now we do. What OpenAI should have done, if it wanted to help reshape the future of education, is stop asking how AI fits into the old paradigm by tinkering at the edges and start imagining and investing in what a new model of education could look like.”
Full op-ed by Merrimack College Prof. Dan Sarofian-Butin at Education Next.
Colleges Need More Comedy
Excerpts (links in the original, boldface added):
"We live in humorless times, and yet the need to laugh seems more vital than ever.
"Conversations on college campuses are tense right now, if they happen at all. I have taught on a university campus for close to two decades, but only recently have I started to give some consideration to comedy as a serious source of study.
"Today, I weave humor into everything and, as an English professor, I find so many promising parallels between jokes and narratives. As the humanities increasingly becomes a target in our data-driven world of deliverables and returns on investment, the study and practice of humor has the potential to enhance and enrich higher education.
"Still, humor is a subject of widespread interest among both those in academia and the larger public. As the world welcomes Pope Leo, I came across a New York Times opinion piece by his predecessor titled 'There is Faith in Humor.' Pope Francis argues that laughter is central to living, just as humor humanizes us. The piece also emphasizes the centrality of comedy to Catholic faith, interfaith conversations and social justice.
"Humor and comedy take courage, of course, and also coincide with creative and critical thinking.
"The next generation of learners can certainly benefit from this focus on lifelong learning through laughter, which in many ways is the freest form of expression."
Full op-ed by Sacred Heart Prof. Cara Erdheim Kilgallen at The Hill.
Other Articles of Interest
Department of Justice Opens Investigation re UC Berkeley’s Alleged Race and Sex-Based Hiring Practices (Press release at DOJ website; full text of DOJ notice is here. See also “UC Sees the Good in Faculty Diversity While DOJ Says It May Be Illegal Discrimination” at LA Times. See also “Internal Documents Show Cornell Hired Based on Race” at City Journal. See also “Civil Rights Complaint Filed Against Cornell Includes Bombshell Whistleblower Emails” at College Fix).
Professors View Teaching as ‘Burden,’ Spend Less Time in Classroom (Full article at College Fix).
Can AI Compensate for an Inferior Education? (Full article at DC Journal).
Guarding Democracy by Teaching Civics (Video at Higher Ed Now).
Higher Ed Progress and Setback (Full article at National Association of Scholars).
College Degrees With Best Financial Return Revealed (Full article at Newsweek).
Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford
Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.
Program Teaches the Art and Craft of Live Storytelling
The Bold Bet That Built a Telescope
New Language Model Helps Patients Understand Their Radiology Reports
You Can Literally Lose Who You Are
“Today, university campuses are criticized for being narrow and doctrinaire. The critics are not all wrong. However, when a university is at its best – when Stanford is at its best – the campus is an unparalleled place for freedom, truth, and enlightenment.” -- Stanford Pres. Jon Levin, 2025 commencement address