Take It or Leave It with Betsy Barre, Bryan Dewsbury, and Emily Donahoe

Higher education in the United States has been faced with unique challenges in 2025, largely because of actions taken by the new U.S. presidential administration: federal grants cancelled midstream, bans on DEI programs, thousands of international students losing visas, and so much more. These actions are unprecedented, and they are making it very hard to work or study at a college or university right now.

This week on the Intentional Teaching podcast, I bring back a popular format, Take It or Leave It, as a way to explore how we (faculty and staff) might respond to the current moment. I invited three wise colleagues to come on the show and discuss recent op-eds that speak to the challenges facing higher education and its teaching mission. For each essay, we decide if we want to Take It (that is, agree with the central thesis of the essay) or Leave It. Our judgments might be binary, but our discussion of the essays and the topics they address is full of nuance and complexity.

The panelists for this edition of Take It or Leave It are Betsy Barre, assistant provost and executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Wake Forest University; Bryan Dewsbury, associate professor of biology and associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University; and Emily Donahoe, associate director of instructional support at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi. All three are experienced Take It or Leave It panelists, and I am very excited to have them back on the show.

The op-eds we discuss are "Higher Ed Is Adrift" by Kevin McClure, which argues that we need more from our institutional leaders during this crisis; "Institutional Neutrality Is a Copout" by John Jenkins, which argues that fostering our students' moral development requires an articulation of institutional values; and "Are You Ready for the AI University?" by Scott Latham, which presents a dramatically disruptive vision for the future of AI in higher education. The panel had lots of thoughts about these essays, and I'll share a few of them here to get you thinking.

Betsy Barre, on the moral calculus of public statements from institutional leaders:

Bryan Dewsbury, on institutions that can't measure the impact of their diversity and equity work:

Emily Donahoe, on our individual and collective responses:

​You can listen to the entire Take It or Leave It panel discussion here (where you'll also find a transcript) or search for "Intentional Teaching" in your favorite podcast app.

Around the Web

This is the part of the newsletter where I link to things that I find interesting in the hopes that you do, too.

• "The Quiet Value of Reclaiming Your Work" - Brielle Harbin is writing a series of posts on The Professor Is In about her ongoing decision to stay in or leave academia. I think my favorite in the series so far is this one about deciding what you might be to offer to fields outside of academia. Whether or not you're considering leaving academia, Brielle poses some useful questions here. "So, when we attempt to define our value outside of the institution that shaped us, we may discover that the first step isn’t rebranding. It’s unlearning."
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• "AI Is Not Your Friend" - You might know Mike Caulfield from his SIFT method for quickly evaluating claims we encounter online. Over the last year or so, Mike has been doing really interesting work exploring the potential for generative AI to support this kind of information literacy. That may sound like an odd thing to explore, given AI chatbots' tendency to make stuff up. In this piece for The Atlantic, Mike argues that the conventions of AI chatbots are the problem, not the AI itself, and he presents a vision for a more useful way to do AI.
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• "Using ChatGPT Is Not Bad for the Environment" - This is a long essay, but if you've been curious or worried about the environmental impact of generative AI, it's worth the read. Andy Masley takes a deep dive into what's known (and unknown) about the energy use and water cost of AI tools like ChatGPT, and he offers some very helpful comparisons to other things that use energy and cost water. I've been surprised at how uncritical some higher ed folks are when they see headlines about AI's environmental cost. This is the critical analysis I've been looking for.

Bird of the Week

This has been a pretty heavy edition of the newsletter, so here's an Eastern Wood-Pewee I finally photographed in my backyard after hearing its "pee-a-wee!" call for days.

Thanks for reading!

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