AKA Review - 10.02.2026

From Matriarchal Blessing

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?

By Celeste Davis

Women’s college enrollment is at an all-time high of 60%. Yet every explanation of this "crisis of men," the author argues, ignores the phenomenon of male flight: "when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry, the men leave," and that profession is then devalued. She notes the flaws of most explanations by highlighting statistics from teaching to veterinary medicine, considers "masculinity norms," and asks why we are straining to find other causes without examining one right in front of us. Read this article

From Inside Higher Ed

Why Shared Governance Is Breaking Down, and How to Fix It

By Matthew MacManes

"The pick-your-lane approach, with faculty owning curriculum and administration the budget, doesn’t work anymore, if it ever really did" the author asserts. He illustrates the futility of this poorly defined distinction with several examples and proposes an alternative, in which shared governance "allocates stages of decision-making rather than domains of authority." Applying this approach to a familiar-sounding budget-cutting effort, he lays out a three-stage sequence and guidelines for a process that is thought-provoking, if challenging to implement. Read this article

From Steven Mintz on Substack

Land Acknowledgments and the Problem of Historical Judgment

By Steven Mintz

Land acknowledgments are criticized both from the Right and within Indigenous studies. Their legitimacy is best evaluated, the author argues, by interrogating them as objects of historical study, since they raise nearly every difficult question involved in judging the past. Such questions are not simply of whether an injustice occurred, but "who was responsible, how that responsibility was distributed across individuals and institutions, what later generations inherited from it, and what obligations, if any, remain today." Read this article

From The New York Times

I Study Successful People. They Have One Habit in Common

By Angela Duckworth

In an essay with significant pedagogical implications at all educational levels, this psychologist asserts that a powerful driver of success is willingness to seek help. "In our personal and professional lives, Americans are encouraged to pursue rugged individualism." Yet research shows that seeking assistance is an essential skill for childhood and youth learning and achievement and predicts overall mental health in adults. Moreover, seeking help is welcomed. "Research shows we consistently underestimate how happy it makes others to lend a hand." Read this article

From Card Catalog

31 AI Terms, Explained

By Hana Lee Goldin

In one of the most useful and engaging articles on AI this year, this former reference librarian explicates 31 terms that "cover the full arc of how AI systems come to exist, how they behave, and how they're held accountable." Organizing them in five clusters, she provides a foundation for understanding nearly everything else we encounter in the AI space and, more importantly, for making us actors in it, able to turn our "passive exposure to this technology into informed engagement with the decisions [about AI] being made around us." Read this article