AKA Review - 02.13.2026

From Washington Monthly

By Alex Bronzini-Vender

Grade inflation has long been a culture-war issue, blamed on campus "softness" toward entitled students or affirmative action. Yet decades of data undermine those claims. The author argues that it stems instead from cost-cutting, especially the "adjunctification" of faculty and reliance on student evaluations that incentivize economically vulnerable contingent instructors to inflate grades. But schools prefer wringing their hands over vague cultural explanations rather than admitting that revenue-maximizing undermines educational quality. Read this article

From Inside Higher Education

Tenure Under Threat

By Emma Whitford

Lawmakers and universities are weakening tenure protections without eliminating the status entirely. Actions include weaponizing post-tenure review; allowing tenured faculty layoffs for "financial strain" (rather than the more stringent "financial exigency"); reducing tenured lines to shrink the number of faculty protected; and increasing speech-related sanctions as American politics tilts right. "The weakening of tenure isn’t due to a flaw in the tenure system, but to institutions’ increasing refusal to stand up for [its] traditional protections." Read this article

From The Atlantic

The Accidental Winners of the War on Higher Ed

By Ian Bogost

With their undergraduate focus and small size, wealthy, elite liberal-arts colleges are less exposed to higher ed’s challenges and will be likely winners in the war on universities. Their lack of doctoral research and Ph.D. students both protects them from Washington’s bullying and enhances students’ classroom experience. A small, diverse student body living in proximity stimulates open discourse and mutual respect. While these colleges may yet be targeted by the White House, the author concludes that their higher-ed model will be the most resilient. Read this article

From Commonweal

Havens for the Human

By Antón Barba-Kay

Universities are no longer "places for democratic education, moral edification, liberal formation, or contemplation for its own sake." Rather they are "in the business of STEM research," dependent on the funding it attracts. The author highlights five ironies in the White House attacks on higher ed, arguing that—in an inconvenient truth for universities—each of these "exhibits the ways in which larger questions of human meaning have come unstuck from the logic of research within universities themselves." Read this article

From Substack

Against Academic Hierarchy

By Steven Mintz

With this critique of an academic hierarchy that privileges theoretical knowledge over applied fields, the author illuminates how "prestige cultures at elite institutions" obscure pernicious intellectual, economic, class, and parochial assumptions. He highlights the intellectual substance of "applied" fields, false equation of prestige and rigor, and a resulting "misallocation of talent" that damages our nation, before concluding with six propositions for building universities capable of "serious work [that] can address problems that actually matter." Read this article