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Search for David Pierpont Gardner Chair in Higher Education and Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education

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CSHE Senior Research Fellow John Aubrey Douglass published a think piece "It Can Happen Here?" on Academe. 

In this article, John A. Douglass discusses the global pattern of growing neonationalist populism and increasing attacks on academic communities, as well as the common threads connecting these attacks. 

How do nationalist tendencies play into, or counter, the global expansion of the university? This Global Perspectives review symposium engages with two timely contributions on the current state of the university in world society: Neo-nationalism and Universities: Populists, Autocrats, and the Future of Higher Education by John Aubrey Douglass (Johns Hopkins 2021) and The University and the Global Knowledge Society by David John Frank and John Mayer (Princeton 2020).

Rille Raaper, Associate Professor at Durham University and a former CSHE visiting scholar (2022), will publish her new book Student Identity and Political Agency: Activism, Representation and Consumer Rights with Routledge in 2024. The book examines the intersections of education, sociology and politics and provides a unique, research-informed account of the student experience in a contemporary higher education setting.

On August 28, 2023, CSHE Faculty Affiliate and SERU Principal Researcher Steven Brint published a new article entitled "The Political Machine behind the War on Academic Freedom" at the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

A new journal article "The 'New Flagship University' and Its Relevance to Brazilian Higher Education", published at the Journal of Research and Innovation in Higher Education (JRIHE), attempted to apply John A. Douglass's "New Flagship University" model to higher education in Brazil.   

In this article, CSHE's Research Associate Jenae Cohn reviewed a keynote panel discussion about artificial intelligence at the 2023 Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Consortium Symposium. Cohn specifically focused on four aspects: defining AI, how AI may change higher education jobs, academic disciplines in response to AI, and ethical considerations. 

John Aubrey Douglass's book The California Idea and American Higher Education (Stanford University Press) was recently translated into Japanese. Tamagawa University Press published the translated book in July 2023.

John Aubrey Douglass is Senior Research Fellow for Public Policy and Higher Education at the Center for Studies in Higher Education, University of California, Berkeley.

The proportion of young Americans holding humanities degrees has declined by about one-third in the past 15 years, with particularly large declines among men.

For decades many universities have focused on global rankings and their progeny, the concept of world-class universities (WCUs), to drive academic planning and resource allocation – often under pressure from ministries to climb up this or that commercial ranking.

As affirmative action loses political feasibility, many universities have implemented race-neutral alternatives like top percent policies and holistic review to increase enrollment among disadvantaged students. I study these policies’ application, admission, and enrollment effects using University of California administrative data. UC’s affirmative action and top percent policies increased underrepresented minority (URM) enrollment by over 20 percent and less than 4 percent, respectively. Holistic review increases implementing campuses’ URM enrollment by about 7 percent.

The midterm elections in the United States brought a sort of victory for President Joe Biden and the Democrats, including the retention of a slim majority in the Senate and ceding only a marginal majority to Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Avoided was an expected much bigger electoral victory by Republicans and a clear majority in both houses of Congress. The net result for federal higher education policy is relative stability, although with some important caveats, including debates on raising the debt level of the federal government.