Category Archives: academia

demystifying graduate education in the USA

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On Sunday, I met with about 65 students at An-Najah National University in Nablus, the West Bank. For about two hours (until our time ran out), they asked me questions about how to pursue graduate education in North America or Europe. Our conversation helped me see that our system must seem mysterious and may be misleading. Here are some points that I found myself making which might be worth sharing with others. …

Generally, you should apply to a graduate program and seek financial aid, which can mean free tuition plus a stipend for a teaching or research assistantship. You should aim not to pay for a graduate degree in the social sciences, humanities, or natural sciences. An admission offer without a financial package is probably not desirable.

You could apply for scholarships in your field that can be used at any institution, but those are extremely competitive. You are much more likely to get support from the university where you enroll, and you should apply for admission even if you know that you couldn’t afford the tuition. You should expect a conversation/negotiation about financial aid.

If you aspire to a PhD, you should apply to a PhD program and receive an MA along the way. In general, you should not seek an MA in your field before applying for a PhD.

You should view MA programs with some skepticism unless they offer substantial financial aid. Professional masters degrees, such as MBAs and MPHs, may make more sense economically, since they can make you more competitive for desirable jobs. But even those require a careful cost/benefit analysis.

Yes, you can wait until after you have graduated with a BA to apply for graduate school. In fact, many programs prefer candidates who have several years of work experience. (This may be less true in the liberal arts than in fields like public policy and law.)

A lengthy graduate program is not worth the years of your life unless you think that you would enjoy those years. But graduate school can be a good experience if the topic interests you, the financial package is manageable, and you would like to live in the community where the university is located. If you pursue a graduate degree just for the outcome, the program should be brief and/or clearly profitable, which may be the case for an MD or a PhD in engineering.

Speaking of “where the university is located,” the USA is a big and diverse country. For anyone, pursuing graduate school will be a different experience if that means living in New York City versus a small Southern college town. For a Palestinian, the difference may be even more important (which is not to say that NYC would obviously be better).

To differentiate yourself from other applicants with equally good grades and scores, you need some depth of knowledge and experience on a particular topic. Your experience may be academic (for instance, a research project), or applied, or both. If you’re at an early stage and you don’t have this kind of depth, a first step is to find a mentor in your own university or community. By the way, you will need references, and mentors can provide letters.

Your application essay should reflect your personality and the admissions criteria of the specific program to which you are applying. That said, if you need a generic template for an essay, consider addressing these three questions: 1) What have you done so far in this field? 2) What do you want to learn in graduate school? 3) What do you want to do with what you’ve learned?

If you want to collaborate remotely with an American academic, don’t email and say you want to do research. Send an email that demonstrates specific understanding of the recipient’s own research and propose new research that would contribute to that person’s agenda.

We also talked a bit about visas and the climate for Palestinians in the USA, but I have focused this blog post on admissions and financial aid because I feel better informed about those issues, and my thoughts might apply to people from other countries.

civic education webinar

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I enjoyed this recent discussion of civic education in colleges and universities with Josiah Ober, Jenna Silber Storey, Mary Clark, and our moderator Debra Satz. I thought the questions from the audience were particularly interesting.

In case you are interested in the Alliance, this is the website.

The next webinar will be “Out of Many, One: Creating a Pluralistic Framework for Civics in Higher Education,” with Paul Carrese (Arizona State University), Jacob Levy (McGill University) and Minh Ly (University of Vermont), moderated by Brian Coyne (Stanford University). That’s on Wednesday, November 12, 2025 from 9:00 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. Pacific (noon Eastern). You could register here.

And the one after that will be “Comparative Civics: Beyond Western Civ.,” with Dongxian Jiang, Shadi Bartsch, Simon Sihang Luo, and me as the moderator. That’s on December 12, 2025, from 9:00-10:00 a.m. PT.

design challenges for civics in higher education

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The Educating for American Democracy (EAD) initiative works to improve k12 history and civic education. One of EAD’s contributions is a list of five “Design Challenges.” Each challenge names tensions between a pair of valid principles.

The tensions are not resolvable. Instead, we encourage teachers (and everyone else involved in civics and history education) to keep the five challenges in mind as they design and offer classes and other programs. We propose that materials, curricula, and pedagogy will be better if people always hold these tensions in mind.

At a meeting this weekend sponsored by the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, it occurred to me that a similar list might be useful for civic educators in higher education. But I don’t think the actual items would be the same. Here is a preliminary list of design challenges for college-level educators, just for consideration.

Realism and Inspiration

  • How can we analyze and understand institutions’ tendency to limit or even suppress human agency while also inspiring students to participate?

Honesty and Appreciation

  • How can we seriously study and discuss deep historical injustices without missing the value of excellent texts and other legacies from the past?

The Personal and the Institutional

  • How can we explore the potential and the limitations of two sometimes competing ways of improving the world: strengthening our own character (broadly defined) and preserving or reforming institutions?

Text and Context

  • How can we read and discuss common texts while also benefitting from the contextual knowledge that specialists offer about each specific work?
  • How can we learn from both the arguments and testimony of exceptional people, such as great writers, and also from empirical patterns in large-scale human behavior?
  • How can we learn from observations and analyses written long ago and from the latest social science?

Science and Values

  • How can we learn by using techniques that minimize the influence of the observer’s values (science) while also rigorously investigating questions of value (normative inquiry)?

Citizens’ Roles and Career Pathways

  • How can we educate students to play the generalist’s role of a citizen (in various contexts and communities) while also helping them to become professionals whose work can have civic benefits?

Pluralism and Shared Fate

  • How can we seriously explore deep differences among human beings–as reflected in our topics of study and in our students’ and teachers’ backgrounds–while also teaching students to reason and work together at various scales, from the classroom though the nation to the globe?
  • How can our assignments and discussions connect to students’ diverse cultural experiences and also stretch them to learn about ideas beyond their experience or contrary to their values?

Study and Experience

  • How can students learn from being responsibly involved in communities despite not having extensive academic knowledge, and how can they study civic topics in the classroom without having extensive civic experience? (In other words, how can students do good in the world if they don’t already know a lot, and how can they grasp and assess texts and ideas about civic life if they have not already experienced much civic engagement?)

Choice and Commonality

  • How can we encourage individuals to choose and display their diverse interests and agendas related to civics while also offering common experiences?
  • How can we offer courses or other experiences for many or all students in a given institution without compromising quality?

Heritage and Innovation

  • How can we introduce students to ideas, institutions, and practices inherited from the past while also helping them to learn to innovate beneficially in civic life?
  • How can we develop both trustees and designers?

(The fact that this list is longer than the EAD’s list of challenges should not imply that college-level education is more complicated or fraught than k12 education is. Quite the contrary. Instead, this list captures my own most recent thinking, and I would probably apply it to K12 as well.)

See also: The Educating for American Democracy Roadmap; Educating for American Democracy: the work continues

the rule of law and the Trump Administration versus higher education

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On Wednesday, according to The New York Times, the Trump Administration sent letters to nine universities offering them financial benefits and relief from investigations if they agree (among other things) to “freeze tuition for five years,” provide “free tuition to students studying math, biology, or other ‘hard sciences’ if endowments exceed $2 million per undergraduate,” “cap the enrollment of international students,” “commit to strict definitions of gender,” and “change their governance structures to prohibit anything that would ‘punish, belittle and even spark violence against conservative ideas.'”

I have not seen the letter itself, but it refers to a “compact” document that the universities are asked to sign, and that is here. It includes, among other things, a provision that “all university employees, in their capacity as university representatives, will abstain from actions or speech relating to societal and political events except in cases in which external events have a direct impact upon the university.” (Does that mean I may not publish an article about Ukraine and identify myself as a Tufts professor?) Erwin Chemerinsky says, “It would be hard to come up with a more explicit attempt to restrict freedom of speech.”

Failure to sign evidently means risking federal support, or at least facing investigations and litigation. “This Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education represents the priorities of the U.S. government in its engagements with universities …. Institutions of higher education are free to develop models and values other than those below, if the institution elects to forego federal benefits.”

Trump won the election, and elections have consequences. The Administration may write regulations governing higher education. So why doesn’t the Department of Education publish this “compact” as a regulation applying to all universities? One rule would then apply to all, and it would be transparent and predictable.

A rule would also be subject to judicial review, and colleges and higher ed. associations would have incentives to sue, arguing that the regulations exceed the statutory authorization of the Department of Education, violate the First Amendment, or both. Some or all of the regulations might survive judicial review. In any case, everyone would know the results and would have to comply with the courts’ rulings. Because the rules would apply to the entire sector of higher education in all 50 states, there might be considerable backlash from voters.

All of this–publicity, consistency, predictability, judicial review, and review by voters–constitutes the rule of law. These letters violate it.

Some institutions may willingly take the deal, and others may decide to settle even if they believe that it undermines their rights because it is cheaper to negotiate than to fight back. Already, the chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents has said that UT is “honored” to have been “named as one of only nine institutions in the U.S. selected by the Trump administration for potential funding advantages.”

The result will be a de facto policy, applied one institution at a time, with no judicial review. Colleges may accept deals that trade away their Constitutional rights. Possibly, students and faculty will have standing to sue their own institutions (as Jimmy Kimmel could have sued ABC), but it will be hard for third parties to challenge these “voluntary” agreements. And institutions that the Administration decides not to target will be left alone, thus reducing any backlash.

It is very important that students, faculty, and alumni of these communities advocate for their institutions not to sign the compact: University of Arizona, Brown, Dartmouth, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, USC, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University, and UVa.

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; AAUP v Rubio; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

AAUP v Rubio

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On March 25, Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by masked ICE agents because she had co-authored a clearly legal op-ed in our campus newspaper, not directly about Israel but about how the university had responded to our student government. According to Andre Watson, the Assistant Director of the National Security Division of ICE, this op-ed could “undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

After an unconscionably long period of detainment in inhumane circumstances, Rümeysa was ordered released. Subsequently, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association sued Donald Trump and members of his administration, seeking an injunction against the policy that had ensnared Rümeysa and other defendants.

Yesterday, federal District Court judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, issued a 161-page decision in favor of the plaintiffs that is a blistering denunciation of the Administration. It makes quite a read.

It starts with the image that I reproduce above. (I have never seen a judicial decision with a front-page illustration.)

The judge’s main finding comes early:

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations (pp. 4-5).

Judge Young does not mince words in the many pages that follow. For example, “the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech on the part of two of his senior cabinet secretaries” (p. 96).

After considering the arguments in favor of masking ICE agents, the court “rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” (p. 98).

The judge explains:

It was never the Secretaries’ immediate intention to deport all pro- Palestinian non-citizens[.] for that obvious First Amendment violation … could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious — to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

The Secretaries have succeeded, apparently well beyond their immediate intentions” (p. 95).

I have been saying that we in academia should enhance ideological pluralism because it’s the right thing to do. It makes our thinking and teaching more rigorous. However, the Trump’s Administration’s attacks on higher education have nothing to do with that goal, except that intellectual diversity is occasionally and inconsistently used as a pretext. The Administration is trying to crush pluralism by applying a set of tools popular among modern authoritarians of the left, center, and right. The Administration’s policies make it considerably more difficult to promote reasonable dialogue across ideological differences on campuses. But more importantly, the government is “terrorizing” vulnerable people into silence.

Near the end of the decision, Judge Young quotes the president who appointed him, Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” The judge concludes:

As I’ve read and re-read the record in this case, listened widely, and reflected extensively, I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message –- yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message. I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important