AKA Review - 08.21.2026

From The Renovator
Renovating America’s Universities

By Danielle Allen
Higher ed's debate over whether the Education Secretary's recent memo on college reform is "an olive branch or a Trojan horse" asks the wrong question. Instead, the author suggests, we must evaluate the questions of message and messenger separately, "then determine a course of action merited by the quality of the message and the ethics and stakes of engaging with the messenger." Concluding that the message is sound, the author considers four questions about the messenger that institutions can use to carry the conversation forward directly with the American public.

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From Forbes

The Case for College Got Too Small

By Rajiv Vinnakota

“Is college worth it?” is nearly always posed in terms of ROI for individual students. But a recent poll shows that, even more than this economic impact, Americans of all parties and classes value college’s role in preparing committed citizens with shared civic values. So as colleges trumpet their “career ROI” but fail to make the more important case that education is how we make citizens, why are we surprised by their declining public trust? Americans “want to know that higher ed is living out its public mission, not just delivering personal gain.” Read this article

From Inside Higher Ed
Academic Civics: What Does It Mean to Be a Citizen of Your University?

By Adam T. Smith
Much as civic education is viewed as solution to disengagement and polarization in American society, universities have civic frameworks that can be reinvented to bind academic communities together to face growing external pressures. The author reviews decades-long forces that have left universities fragmented and alienated and draws on a report from Cornell faculty to describe three institutional commitments to reverse this pattern. Together, they make “the difference between inhabiting a university and belonging to one.” Read this article

From The New York Times

I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

By Brett Stephens

Writing with AI is mentally enfeebling, the NY Times columnist argues. It undermines not only the individual’s writing “but also a society’s collective ability to reason,” create, and care. Writing uniquely compels thought, giving words moral weight. Thus, AI’s threat is also to democratic self-governance. “People who can read and write for themselves have, historically, also been good at choosing and advocating for themselves.” So type out your own response “as an act of free will….What takes you a few additional seconds is an act of resistance against an ever-dumber world.” Read this article

From The Atlantic

Three Ways to Think about AI and Jobs

By Rogé Karma
Despite fear that AI will make many careers obsolete, the impact is difficult to predict. The author posits three questions that help determine how susceptible to AI replacement a job really is: (1) how easily its “clean” rote tasks can be severed from “messy” unpredictable ones, (2) the extent to which, by lowering costs, AI causes demand to rise, and (3) whether technology enhances or commodifies the worker’s expertise. Yet, he revisits the oft-cited ATM example to emphasize how hard even the most dramatic impacts of technology are to predict. Read this article