Avigail: Hi, I'm Avigail Oren.
Lizzy: And I'm Lizzy Ghedi-Ehrlich.
Avigail: And we are your hosts for Scholars Strategy Network’s No Jargon. Every other week, we will discuss an American policy problem with one of the nation's top researchers—without jargon.
Lizzy: And we're the nation's top researcher central and the nation's top researchers, and all of them, truly, are really in the spotlight these days.
Avigail: Absolutely. It is a very stressful time. To be an instructor, to be a researcher, to be an administrator in higher education. And that is at all levels, not just at the Harvard’s and Columbia’s that are in the headlines, but also down to the most hyper-local community colleges.
Lizzy: Yeah, I can say after working at SSN for over a decade now, so all I do, all day, all week, year in and year out, is surround myself with researchers, mostly social scientists, but all sorts of people, from all sorts of places, big and small, elite and less well known, and I think it's really interesting to see how there does appear to be this ascendant public perception of the person who works at a college and university as being part of this small elite cadre. I look at the history of when colleges and universities even started here in the States and the democratization and just the vertical and horizontal spread is incredible.
Like there are so many different kinds of schools for people. There are so many different kinds of degrees. There are elite institutions. Sometimes they are places for the best and brightest to innovate. And they're also massive centers of workforce development. They are economic and social anchors for different places.
It’s really a lot of things and sometimes I worry that it makes the messaging harder. It's difficult to really convey the full scope of all that the U.S. systems of college and universities, public and private, are.
Avigail: That's absolutely right. And actually, that's a perfect segue into our discussion. For this episode, I spoke to Dr. Cecilia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education in the Morgridge College of Education at the University of Denver, and co-director of the Alliance for Research on Regional Colleges (ARRC). She researches regional public universities, rural serving post-secondary institutions, and organization, administration, and public policy for higher education.
Here's our conversation.
Avigail: Professor Orphan, thanks so much for coming on No Jargon.
Cecilia: Thank you so much for having me. I’m a big fan of your podcast and the idea of having these conversations without jargon so I look forward to our conversation.
Avigail: Same. And thank you for being such a big fan of the show.
So to get us started, we're seeing escalating attacks from President Trump and his administration on higher ed institutions, which is what you study. So, how would you describe the current moment that higher ed is in and what are the biggest threats that the sector is facing?
Cecilia: This is a great question and I especially appreciate the word attack in this because this is strategic attacks higher education that come from a place of clear understanding of where the vulnerabilities are within our sector. And so I think the most important thing to first say in this conversation is that you may hear some dialogue that this is an unprecedented moment, and I actually don't agree with that.
I think higher education has always oscillated between periods of relative inactivity in the policy space and a lack of attention from policymakers to moments where it's been a hyper focus of policymakers and politicians.
And so one that comes to mind in our fairly recent history is the McCarthy era, of course, and this was a time in which colleges and universities had professors and students who were doing research and who were speaking out about the U.S.' involvement in the Cold War and other international affairs. And so this is a very recent moment in our history, and so we're seeing something similar now. So I think that this is kind of a normal thing that happens in American policy in American higher education. Normal meaning that it happens regularly throughout our history if we take a long view of history.
I think that the biggest threat right now is a lack of collective action on the part of colleges and universities and other organizations that work in and with higher education. And so I’ve been very alarmed by a lack of collective speaking out on the part, in particular, of college presidents. And this is something many people have pointed out. And so that's why it was heartening to see last week, a statement that the American Association of Colleges and Universities released that is pushing back on these attacks on higher education and the last time I checked I think there was over 200 presidents who had signed onto that. And I think the number is higher now.
And so I think that's an important step in the right direction and the American Association of University Professors has also issued a few lawsuits against the Trump administration, as have other higher education associations so I'm hopeful to see more of that action take place because right now it is very alarming to see so many other college and university presidents and chancellors try just to fly under the radar and not call too much attention to them in their institutions. And I think there's maybe somewhat of a Faustian bargain going on there where they think if they can just be quiet and they won't be attacked, but I just don't think that that's true. I think that they're starting with these very visible, very famous colleges and universities like Columbia and Harvard because there's a sense that if they can get those institutions to comply, which have a lot of resources and a lot of power, other colleges and universities will fall in line and that is why at the beginning of what I just shared, I talked about strategy. They have a strategy. What I'm seeing less of on the part of higher education is a strategy to respond. But I’m hopeful that that’s starting to develop as we see examples, like on the part of Harvard, of what resistance might look like. But it's not gonna be enough for one, even one college as powerful and well-resourced as Harvard, to come out and resist these attacks.
We really need a broader scale response that involves many different colleges and universities and educational organizations coming together and acting collectively to push back on these attacks.
Avigail: So before we turn to what those institutions are and how they differ from the Columbias and Harvards, I'm so glad that you sort of historicized these attacks, and presented them as actually quite precedented.
But I think there are two things happening now—two particular tactics that are, if not unique to the present moment are, certainly, highlighted or functioning differently in this moment. And that's the attacks on DEI and the broad cancellation of research grants. Does that feel like a fair characterization to you? That these two tactics are being used in new and specific ways at this moment?
Cecilia: I think to the first point around diversity, equity, and inclusion, what's unique about DEI efforts on college campuses is that they're meant to influence both the curriculum and what students learn as well as the co-curriculum life on campus. And what I mean by co-curriculum is everything that happens outside of the classroom that a student participates in by virtue of going to college. So this is things like Greek life and student activities, sports, student clubs and organizations, graduation ceremonies and things of that nature.
When the Civil Rights Movement was taking place in the United States in the sixties and the fifties, there was also at the same time within higher education an effort to create ethnic studies programs, most notably at the University of San Francisco. And there was quite a lot of political pushback on the creation of these programs. We saw similar pushback on the creation of women's studies and queer studies programs.
So I think that, I'm not sure I agree totally that the attack on DEI is unprecedented in the sense that there have been earlier efforts to bring more diverse perspectives into campus life that really center on the ways in which different groups are oppressed and marginalized in society. However, I would agree that DEI as a broader sweeping set of changes that goes beyond creating distinct programs of study like ethnic studies, that is new. And it's tactical in the sense that they understand that DEI as a framework is doing more than just changing what certain students learn if they choose to study that.
It's changed how we consider students who are applying to our institutions. It has changed the hiring process for faculty, staff, and administrators on many campuses, as well as aspects of the curriculum and overall student life. So in that way, it's been a fairly broad set of moves that many colleges and universities have made to try and create more inclusive campus environments for faculty, staff, and students. And so it is a natural focus of this administration, which, not only doesn't care about inclusion and addressing forms of oppression, is actually actively participating in reinforcing systems of oppression in society, I would argue.
And then your second tactic—I think that it’s accurate that research grants and funding are more of a focus now than they would've been in the McCarthy era. Some of that has to do with just the increased amount of research funding that the federal government gives to higher education where it was beginning to form in the forties, fifties, and sixties, and you had the creation of different federal agencies during that time that would target funding to higher education. And so it may not have been as much of a focus then, however, there have been other instances in which funding has been used as a tool to try and get campuses to fall into line with the dominant political ideology.
And so one example of that is there was a college that was a religious institution, and I can't remember the name of it, but they were refusing to admit a certain group of students and the federal government said that “this is against our requirements for inclusion and the rights that people hold and we will revoke your tax free status if you continue to do that.” And so that is a kind of a different example, but a similar tactic in the sense that it's about funding and the resources and institution has.
And what's really interesting and ironic about the focus on federal grants is that I don't think maybe a lot of people understand this, but the federal government is not being necessarily altruistic in giving money to colleges and universities as part of its federal research funding. All of the federal grants and contracts that are closely connected to national strategic priorities. And so it expands a variety of areas including cancer research, strategic weapons development, and other forms of strategic priorities that we hold as a country. And so when the federal government is giving money to colleges and universities, they are doing it because they know what the benefits are and it helps improve their ability to enact their strategic priorities.
And so it's just a really ironic way to try and hold colleges and universities, which may work against other aims the Trump administration has, which I'm not sure they fully understand for themselves why these kinds of grants and contracts exist and how that money comes back to support other federal priorities that the Trump administration likely has.
Avigail: So that's actually a great segue into the subject of your research, which is regional public universities (RPU). So, can you define what an RPU is for folks who might not be familiar? Folks might be more familiar with a community college or perhaps a private school that broadly admits and serves students like commuter campuses. But what in particular is a regional public university?
Cecilia: I want to scope out and then scope back in.
Scoping out, we have over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country, and it is arguably the most diverse post-secondary sector in the world. And it has a lot to do with the way that education was viewed by the founders of the United States and the early leaders. And there was just nervousness or suspicion of too much federal oversight or intervention into education. And so they really left it to the states and local communities to develop schools and colleges and universities. And that's why we have so many different colleges and universities and so many different types.
And the ones that many people are most familiar with that are kind of in the public imagination are those that are either really famous, like Harvard or Columbia or Stanford. And these are universities that are very difficult to get into if you're applying to them. They conduct cutting edge research. They accept students from all around the world. They're very wealthy. Historically they've been and still to this day, they’ve been fairly limited in the diversity of students that they admit if you look at economic diversity. So you're just much more likely to be a student at one of these institutions if your parents are fairly wealthy or upper middle class. And then racial diversity has improved somewhat, particularly when affirmative action was still in place, but we've some of the racial diversity that we’ve gained in those institutions.
The other group of schools that I think are very visible that people generally know what they do and understand them is community colleges. And these largely grant associates or two-year degrees or other types of technical education and that you might want to go into trades. And the two-year degrees, most often, are maybe an associates in English that you would want to transfer those credits into a four-year university afterwards.
The other kind of group of very visible institutions are flagship institutions. These are most often land-grant universities. They're called land grants because they were established through a grant of land from the federal government to states to create a college or a university. And these are your big state schools like Florida State University or California Berkeley, or in my state, Colorado State University.
And so the schools that I study are the regional public universities. And for a long time, people talked about them as being kind of in between community colleges and the flagship universities. And I have tried really hard to help people understand that they're not just these institutions that are kind of not community colleges, not the flagship universities, but they actually have a very unique mission and role that they play.
So there are about 470+ regional public universities. You know them because every state has them. And the easy way to tell if it's a regional public is if it has either a compass directional in the name like Western Carolina University or Eastern Tennessee State University. Or it could be a branch of a system, so the largest RPU system in the country, two of the largest are in California and New York. So California has the California State University system and all of the schools in there. So CSU Sacramento, CSU San Marcos, et cetera. And then in New York, you have the CUNY and the SUNY schools. The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, for example, or the SUNY Oneida College. These are regional public universities. So that's just names. Now, what do they actually do?
What makes regional public universities unique is that they first have high acceptance rates, so 80% or more of their applicants. And that's a really important part of their mission. They view themselves as local access points for higher education. And in fact, if you look at the history of many of these institutions, they were established in communities that didn't have an accessible college or a university in them. And that's why around half are in rural communities and are also rural-serving institutions, and they're really the only college or university within 50 to a 100 miles.
So that access aspect of what they do is really important. Another part of what makes them distinct is that they're very student centered. So where a school like Harvard, their primary mission is to produce cutting edge research, and they educate students in addition to that and involve students in that research. But I would argue a place like Harvard is really focused on research.
Now, if I look in my own backyard at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, their primary mission is to serve the students and the people of Denver. And so when you look at what faculty are required to do, for example, they teach a lot of classes and they're evaluated on how well they mentor and support students, particularly students who tend to go to college at a regional public university, and these are students that are more likely to be first in their families to go to college like I was, are more likely to be students of color, more likely to be low-income, veterans, immigrants, and adults. So people who have more responsibilities. Maybe they have children or caretaking responsibilities. And so there's an expectation among faculty and staff at these institutions that you are doing everything you can to support these students in the various ways they need you to do that.
And then the other aspect of their mission is that they serve their regions. And so that is why you will see a pretty tight alignment between the kinds of degrees that are offered at a regional public university, particularly at the masters and the doctoral level. And those degrees align with local workforce needs. And that is because most of the students come from 50 to 10 miles away from the campus and they want to stay in that community after college. And so they're looking for degrees that will help them realize that goal. The local business leaders often hold a degree from a regional public university, or they have received some kind of continuing education from the university. And the same is true for government officials. It's very common, for example, to see the mayor of a rural town if they have a college degree, it's probably from that public university and then certainly, the K-12 schools. The most important contributions that regional publics make to American society, and that is the role that they play in educating school teachers.
And this is a historic mission because many of them were established as teacher education campuses. We called them normal schools at one time. And then they were called teachers colleges and they have since evolved into four-year universities with your kind of typical menu of different degrees and programs that you would see at like a flagship. But teacher education remains a really important part of the work that they do. What that means is that those teachers that teach in those schools, they are helping their students understand that if this is an option you might consider. And with that kind of overarching mission to be student centered, accessible, and serve the community, we also find through our research that they're just more affordable than your flagship or private institutions. And so that affordability is a really important way in which they're able to fulfill the access part of their mission to foster that local access for students.
Avigail: So I want to connect the importance of these schools back to the threats we began with. But before we go there, I think we can actually dive even a little bit deeper into how your research is pushing us to not just understand, but actually sort of reframe or rethink the value of RPUs to their students and communities.
And so you've written about narrow ideas of what makes college worth it. And I was really taken by your 2022 article in Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, where you push back against the U.S. news rankings which really associate acceptance rates with the quality of an institution, but also push back against the idea that the best measure of an education is the economic outcome or upward mobility of an individual. And instead, you're sort of seeing it even more broadly, this ROI return on investment even more broadly. And I was wondering if you could kind of talk about that? Because to me, it was really mind blowing.
Cecilia: I love this question. This is something I'm very passionate about and there's a lot of different things to unpack here. One being, for some reason, I don’t know how this happened, Avigail, but for some reason we generally equate the quality of a college or a university with how exclusive it is, how hard it is to get into, and it's just kind of ironic because that has nothing to do with the educational value that it provides or the value that it provides society.
It just means that it's really hard to get into that place. And the research is really interesting on this. When you look at the quality of teaching and instruction at very prestigious colleges and universities that are very hard to get into, and you compare it to that which is taking place in minority-serving institutions like historically Black colleges and universities, or regional public universities, which also can have a minority-serving institution designation or community colleges, we find that the teaching is much better in those institutions than it's in highly prestigious institutions. The one exception is the very prestigious liberal arts colleges that still have a focus on teaching and learning and students, the instruction there is quite good as well.
And so it's something I love to do with people is ask them when they are talking about rank of a college or a university according to US News and World Report, and I just like to ask them, so what do you think goes into the ranking methodology? And they’ll say, “Well, I imagine it has to do with how much students learn and what happens in the classroom, or what their experience is on campus.” And what we know when you look at the methods of the ranking systems and they're all public, is the metrics have a lot to do with inputs. By that I mean, what are the test scores that students arrive on campus with? How wealthy is the institution? There is one proxy for teaching quality, which is class size. But beyond that, they really haven't been able to systematically show what the benefits or the outcomes are of these colleges and universities. And so I just really like to help people think about how they equate value and maybe some of the ways in which we default to certain understandings of value that may not align with what we actually think education is for and about.
So for me, I'm really interested in the role that higher education plays in society. How does it contribute to society? And I think this is a really important question, particularly right now, as we have a presidential administration that is attacking higher education. And these contributions to society, yes, they are about upward mobility, and this is something that regional public universities do extremely well. So in the last 10 years or so, there's been more and more research showing that these colleges and universities accept students who are very low-income or moderate-income levels, and they propel them into middle class or upper middle class lives. And no other sector in American higher education does that to the degree that regional public universities do. So I don't want to discount how important that work is. It's a huge contribution to individuals. But I'm also interested in the broader contributions they make to society.
So we know through other research that communities that have a regional public university in them, they recover more quickly from recessions and other economic shocks. This is something I know anecdotally, and I'd love to see research exploring this more, but we know that when there's a natural disaster in a local community, it's often the regional public university that steps up.
So an example of that would be when Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina, Appalachian State University, which is a regional public university and a rural serving institution, and Western Carolina University, these are both rural serving institutions, they became first responders in that disaster. And what's really interesting about those institutions is that they're actually the utilities for those communities. So they run the broadband internet that's accessible more broadly. One of them does water treatment. One of them oversees the electric grid. And these are things that we don't often think about colleges and universities doing, but because they are the largest employer in their region, they're an anchor institution, and they have a mission to serve that region, they understood they need that support. And so, when the natural disaster happened, they worked very quickly to get things back online and to support the community. They opened up their cafeterias and offered free meals, and so it's just a very collective way to understand value in higher education and the value that colleges and universities create that I would like more of us to think about.
Yes, it has value to the individual, that's very clear. The research is clear that if you go to college, for example, and you get a bachelor's degree, you're gonna make a million dollars more in your lifetime. And that is a clear value. It's one that I have benefited from my group. I grew up very low income, I was homeless at times as a child, and I am very grateful that I was able to go to college and I live a middle class lifestyle and my children will have a middle class upbringing. And that is a very important individual benefit I have received. But I think it's really important to not lose sight of the collective benefits and value that higher education creates.
And I think this is part of what can be the most important thing we do right now in this moment, and it's something that Harvard has done in a really interesting way. So if you visit the homepage of Harvard right now, it is just a summary that's interactive of their research and all of the discoveries that have changed the lives of Americans and people around the world that have originated at Harvard. And I think for too long in higher education, we have just kind of assumed that that more broad benefit is self-evident and we don't need to talk about it or articulate it as much. And we focus more on talking about the individual benefits to people, that you'll make more money, you'll experience less unemployment, you'll have better life outcomes. And I think this is an opportunity for us to come together as a sector and say, we provide collective benefit to society and to every person living in this country. Here are the tangible ways in which we do that, and here are how the political attacks on our sector are threatening our ability to make your life better and to make our entire community and our country better.
Avigail: So I think you just brilliantly identified the stakes that the Trump administration's policies are having. And I want to ask you if regional public universities are seeing the same pressures that the Columbias and Harvards are seeing?
Cecilia: I would actually say that some of the political attacks on regional public universities happened prior to the Trump administration at the state level, depending on the state. So, Idaho, Florida, Texas—these are examples of states that have passed legislation or have had very active legislatures and governors that have targeted higher education.
So Florida, for example, we had the governor basically take over New College of Florida, which is a really interesting, innovative college that really focused on being super inclusive and kind of helping students develop their own passions. And the governor viewed it as an activist campus and basically took it over, fired the board of trees, installed a new president. They have tried to establish sports at this college, which was more of a liberal arts college without really a good plan to do that. So there's like batting cages and the parking lots of the college at one time before there were even baseball diamonds for people to play baseball. So it's kind of a comical, but a very alarming example of how state politicians have been trying to kind of take over colleges and universities.
Another example is Boise State University in Idaho. They are literally in the eyesight of the state legislature being right down the hill from the Capitol, and they have experienced a lot of pressure from the governor and the legislature to eradicate any DEI programming long before Trump was elected and became president.
And then of course, Texas had a legislation that was passed banning DEI before Trump became president.
While the ways in which the attacks are playing out differ because these are not institutions that typically do a ton of research, they have been in place for longer, depending on the state context. And I don't know this for sure, but I suspect that people in the Trump administration watched what these states were doing and borrowed tactics from them. What we've seen so far in the current presidential administration is more of a focus and a target on research institutions. However, we know that that's probably going to be expanded and, in fact, the Dear Colleague letter that was attacking DEI, it applies to all colleges and universities. It's really important to note that Dear Colleague letters, executive orders, they're not law, they're guidance. And until that goes through a legislative body like Congress or is decided on by a judicial body like the Supreme Court, it is up to colleges and universities to decide whether or not they will comply.
Now, obviously we have seen that the stakes are very high for them and if they don't comply, they could lose funding. And there's also this other part of the attack is to take away the visas of international students. Right now the, the rhetoric is that they were engaged in speech that is hateful or against the priorities of the federal government or is antisemitic.
However, I think it's also a tactic to hit at another revenue stream for colleges and universities because as enrollments have started to decline in different states and different parts of higher education, many colleges and universities have looked to international markets to bring in more students. And if it's a public institution, these students pay higher tuition. And so this is something that also affects regional public universities where the cases that have gotten the most attention are students that are at more elite institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education has been tracking the visa revocations that they are aware of and we know that there have been several in regional public universities. I think what's really important to know is that regional public universities are very underfunded compared to other colleges and universities. What that means is they have fewer staff who can support international students that maybe are being targeted like they are now.
The other thing that can happen is there are a group of regional public universities that do a good bit of research, and so they do access these federal grants and contracts. And this is kind of a technical thing, but it matters a lot. So one of the things that the Trump administration is trying to do right now is to reduce the IDC rate that colleges and universities can take. The spells as indirect cost. What that is, that money is, it's kind of like a tax that colleges and universities charge their researchers to be able to do research on their campuses and that tax pays for things like labs and maintenance of those labs and the administrative staff support it requires to be the home of a large federal grant and for a regional public university, those IDC rates are really important. That money is really important to help them be able to do the research that they can do because they don't have big endowments, they don't have a lot of other research money coming in, and so cutting those IDC rates can be very challenging for these institutions and could shut down an entire program of research because the institution isn't able to collect those taxes to help build up the research infrastructure of the campus.
So I think that's kind of the thing I'd like to say—these political attacks have been happening in the sector. It's just been more state by state. Some states it hasn't been the case because there's more progressive or liberal leaders in place that are not targeting her education. But other states have been. And no one right now, no college or university, is immune to this political attack on higher education. Everyone is wondering “how do we respond, how do we navigate?” It's particularly troubling for these institutions because they serve the students that are the focus of the attacks. They serve a lot of students of color, low-income students, veterans, and so when you have a Dear Colleague letter that is saying that you can't focus on racial equity and that is a huge part of your mission and the work that you do because you serve many students of color, it can create an existential crisis of how do we continue to serve our students and advance our mission in the face of these attacks.
Avigail: At the beginning you mentioned that you're seeing university presidents kind of come together or starting to take collective action to push back. I wanted to kind of end by thinking about what can be done or should be done to oppose some of these policies or to just generally help people better understand why these institutions should be protected.
Cecilia: It's a really good question. It's one I agonized about a lot, Avigail. And so there's a lot of ideas that I have had. They're not necessarily my ideas, they're things I've read that other people have proposed.
I think one thing that's really important to mention in this conversation is before the Trump administration, we saw declining public trust in higher education. A lot of that has to do with the early political attacks and the ways in which higher education was being framed by very powerful people, either at the state level or nationally. But I also think we bear some of the responsibility in people's mistrust in higher education. And when institutions care more about pursuing prestige or fame or research than they do about taking care of their students, that causes people to question whether or not higher education is worth it and if it provides value. Or when institutions aren't very good at sharing how they meaningfully improve society and improve people's lives. I think people lose sight of why it matters.
And so we also live in an era in which people hold an enormous amount of student loan debt. I mean, it’s in the trillions of dollars at this point. And so even if you had an excellent education and if you walked away from your degree with a lot of debt and you still haven't paid it off, you're going to very rightfully have questions about the value of college and the role of college in society. I think it's important to connect the increase in student loan debt with also the declining investment in higher education, particularly public higher education that states have engaged in. So, you know, when I went to college in 2006, I qualified for maximum Pell Grants, which is the grant for low-income students, and I got a state grant as well. It paid for the entire cost of tuition and I even had a little bit of money left over for books. That is no longer the case. Pell grants have not kept up with the increased cost of colleges and universities. States have really cut their funding. Tuitions have increased. And so it's gotten quite expensive. And so that is something we need to figure out — How do we get states to reinvest? How do we tell the broader story of how colleges and universities contribute to society? And take it to just everyday Americans, in addition to policymakers who are funding and making policy decisions about colleges and universities. And help everyday people understand how higher education improves their lives, and what the plan is to make sure that we can contain our costs and keep things more affordable.
So that's, I think, a really important thing that more people need to consider. If the value of higher education was so evident and people understood it extremely well, we would see more of a mass outcry for the ways in which higher education is being attacked. Right now, we're not seeing that. And so we really need to make the case to everyday Americans.
And then the other piece, I'll just reiterate it, that I was talking about at the beginning is that there needs to be strategic collective action on the part of colleges and universities and other organizations that are attached to higher education, and there's some of this developing. I know that there's a law firm that has been helping colleges and universities strategize and come together and we just need to see more collective action that resists what is happening at the federal level and makes it clear that you can't just pick off one or two of us and expect the rest of us to fall in line. If you come for one of us, you come for us all, and we're going to stand up and we're going to fight back.
And it takes a lot of courage to do that. I think many college presidents are just kind of trained to protect their institutions to try and make sure the finances are okay, and many are operating from a place of fear and reaction when we really need college presidents in particular and boards that stand behind them to act with more courage and determination and resolve that this isn't okay, that we make important contributions to society, that you are threatening these contributions, and we're not gonna stand for it.
Avigail: On that note, that beautiful note, thank you, Professor Orphan, for a great conversation. I could have talked all day about this topic. So thank you for coming on the podcast.
Cecilia: Well, thank you so much for the invitation. More importantly, thank you for using this platform to spotlight these issues and to raise even more awareness of what's going on with higher education and why it really matters to everyone.
Avigail: And thanks for listening. For more on Professor Orphan's work, check out our show notes at scholars.org/nojargon. No Jargon is the podcast of the Scholar Strategy Network, a nationwide organization that connects journalists, policymakers, and civic leaders with America's top researchers to improve policy and strengthen democracy.
The producers of our show are Wendy Chow and Dominik Doemer. Our audio engineer is Peter Linnane. If you liked the show, please subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your shows. You can give us feedback on X, formerly known as Twitter, @NoJargonPodcast, or at our email address [email protected].