Research 2025: Politics, AI at the Forefront, then Meet One Another

Whether research follows practice or practice follows research, 2025 was a year in which higher education research publishing worked in synchronicity with the realities of the day. Artificial intelligence and its use on college campuses along with the politics surrounding DEI initiatives and higher education were at the forefront. Arguments could be made that the two topics, at times, became intertwined. 

Leadership Reflections from Susan Komives

Susan Komives, professor emerita at the University of Maryland, retired in 2012; but after 56 years, she is still active in the field of student affairs and leadership. She received her Doctorate of Education from the University of Tennessee in 1973 and has since accrued over 12,000 journal citations from other researchers. In the June 2025 edition of the Journal of Higher Education Policy and Leadership Studies, a nearly 4,000-word interview with Komives was published that covers her early influences as a student of higher education, her progression as a student leadership development researcher, the development of her Leadership Identity Development Model, and the subsequent founding of the National Clearinghouse for Leadership Programs. She shares insights into her research and work and of her peers, publishing of a number of books, including “Exploring Leadership: For College Students Who Want to Make a Difference,” which is a treatise on the Relational Leadership Model that has seen three editions and translations in Japanese and Chinese.

The interview is a clear view into Komives’ path in higher education, her work ethic, and her inferred reliance on the teams of professionals she has worked with over the years. Komives shares how leadership styles and behaviors have changed and advanced to include concepts like capacity, identity, efficacy, generativity, power and oppression, and process, and that “extensions in this scope have roots in previous thinking and lead us to new perspectives often transformed by more equity and critical, inclusive thinking.” 

It is in the latter stages of the interview, she provides some direction and reflection on where work in leadership might unfold in the future for departments of higher education and student affairs. Komives speaks to where she sees the future successes in leadership development, sharing her takes on collective efficacy, leadership in group and collective contexts, and advancing equitable and just leadership practices. She refers readers to the book “A Research Agenda for Leadership and Development through Higher Education,” which she and Julie E. Owen (George Mason University School of Integrative Studies) edited in 2023. At 14 chapters and nearly 300 pages, it is considered a comprehensive and critical overview of research on all aspects of contemporary leadership education that Komives says was created “with some phenomenal thinkers on research on comprehensive dimensions of leadership education.”

“The Opinionated University” by Brian Soucek

In Brian Soucek’s just-published “The Opinionated University,” the Martin Luther King Jr. professor of law at the University of California–Davis is about as opinionated as one could be about universities trying to become bastions of neutrality when it comes to contentious issues on free speech, climate change, gender, or other hotbed issues that populate campuses these days. Neutrality, he argues, only prevents universities from standing up for their values and causes them to lose sight of their mission.

Many universities seeking out that position of neutrality reference adherence to the tenants of the Kalven Report, a 1967 document produced by a University of Chicago committee at the time of the Vietnam protests on college campuses. The intent was to preserve free speech against rash decisions made by university leaders, but Soucek argues institutional neutrality creates more problems than it solves.

Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle in November and just prior to release of his book, Soucek criticizes the compact the Trump administration offered to colleges and universities as an attempt to silence them through neutrality. “Climate change centers would have to stay neutral on the benefits of transitioning from coal to solar power. Law school deans could no longer come together, as they did in 2021, to condemn the January 6 riots as a threat to the rule of law,” he wrote. In one chapter of “The Opinionated University,” he argues that “silence is not always silent.”

Soucek also argues that universities should publicly support transgender students when military recruiters visit campuses as a reaction to President Donald Trump’s Executive Order banning transgender people from the military. His extended argument is that while many institutions will fall back on their neutrality doctrine via the Kalven Report, there is a window of opportunity for them to end their silence and show commitment to causes. Soucek notes that the Kalven Report says a university should stay silent on a matter, but with this cautionary predicate: “From time to time, instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

Soucek, B. (2026). The Opinionated University: Academic Freedom, Diversity, and the Myth of Neutrality in American Higher Education. University of Chicago Press.

“The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI” by Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger

Do not let the word “teaching” in the title of Tricia Bertram Gallant and David A. Rettinger’s book “The Opposite of Cheating: Teaching for Integrity in the Age of AI” intimidate you; recommendations include working with students and even co-workers to “co-create ethical standards with you and their peers” and are thoroughly transferable to the student union and anyone else in the student affairs division.

Developing those standards can be done through a few different ways:

• Informational: Bringing consensus and clarity about concrete definitions of ethical lines
• Attitudinal: Helping shape attitudes about what we collectively find to be acceptable in the campus community
• Social: Leveraging research showing that social norms within a group can impact decision-making more than the risk of punishment

Gallant, director of academic integrity and the Triton Testing Center at the University of California–San Diego, and Rettinger, an applied professor and undergraduate program director in psychology at the University of Tulsa, share that they have found that a conversation as short as 20 to 30 minutes of class time (supported by some independent reading) can be extremely beneficial. What is most important is that staff, administrators, and teachers “show up” for others and reinforce and support learning and assessment.

First, start by covering the basics of academic integrity “and the behaviors you’re not willing to compromise on and the values you think are important. Then, facilitate students talking to one another about integrity.” The authors note that “hearing students talking about values and how they want to uphold them in the class can be really rewarding. It will remind you that most of your students want the same thing as you do—an honest environment in which everyone can learn.”

With the internet, AI, and other technological resources, academics and practitioners are no longer the sole owners of authority when it comes to knowledge and information.

Gallant, T. B., & Rettinger, D. A. (2025). The opposite of cheating: Teaching for integrity in the age of AI. University of Oklahoma Press.

“Generative Artificial Intelligence as an Enabler of Student Feedback Engagement: A Framework” in Higher Education Research & Development

It is no mistake that David Boud, a distinguished professor of education systems and policy at Deakin University in Melbourne, is the fourth-highest cited researcher on Google Scholar when screening for the label “higher education.” His work has been cited by others nearing 90,000 times, including 36,000 times in the last six years, and he is the author of the definitive textbook, “Reflective Teaching in Higher Education.” Trained as a physicist who moved on to research and then education pedagogy, Boud produced an interesting article on AI with co-authors for an edition of Higher Education Research & Development.

Titled “Generative Artificial Intelligence as an Enabler of Student Feedback Engagement: A Framework,” Boud and team look at feedback practices used with students to ascertain effective learning. Traditional methods for deriving feedback are often hampered by student disengagement, contextual constraints (like the time and the space in which inquiries are conducted), and the workloads of faculty and staff. A cure, the authors believe, is AI, and in this piece of research, they propose a framework for implementing AI to improve feedback, ascertain the participant’s feedback literacy, and positively influence the feedback environment.

One of the principal challenges of using AI for conducting the sessions is an argument for training students in the use of AI: “If students are not properly trained or misuse GenAI, it could inhibit their engagement and learning.”

The design of the presented framework finds that generative AI “can potentially enhance student feedback engagement since it can provide rapid personalized feedback, enable ongoing interaction, afford repeated practice, and trace the whole feedback process.”

Zhan, Y., Boud, D., Dawson, P., & Yan, Z. (2025). Generative artificial intelligence as an enabler of student feedback engagement: a framework. Higher Education Research & Development, 44(5), 1289-1304. DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2025.2476513

Countering Legislative Attacks on Higher Education: Challenges, Strategies, and Future Directions” from The Journal of Higher Education

The special edition of The Journal of Higher Education, “Countering Legislative Attacks on Higher Education: Challenges, Strategies, and Future Directions,” opens with an introductory article of the same title by Kaleb Briscoe (Oklahoma State University), Liliana Garces (University of Texas–Austin), and Royel Johnson (University of Southern California).

The co-editors introduce and set the stage for 10 additional articles focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion topics that range from the approaches of university general counsels, an examination of the parallels between campus staff and community organizing related to equity efforts, and, one of the most read, “Justice, Like Beauty, is in the Eye of the Beholder: A Critical Historical Reimagining of Justice Possibilities in an Anti-DEI Higher Education Landscape.”

In that article, co-authors Uma Mazyck Jayakumar and Rican Vue, both from the University of California–Riverside’s Department of Education, use composite counter-storytelling and Critical Race Theory through a protagonist facing the dilemma of taking part in aspects of a DEI ban at the University of North Carolina. Writing in the abstract, the authors say, “Through encounters with spirit guides embodying epistemic exile across institutional boundaries, we illuminate interpretive reimagination: a justice-driven alternative to repressive legalism that navigates legal ambiguity with radical creativity. In doing so, this paper refuses erasure, affirms memory, and demands more than survival in an era of white institutional reconstruction.”

Author Zora Neale Hurston and activist Paul Murray inform the work of Uma Jayakumar and Rican Vue in an article that uses Critical Race Theory and composite counter-storytelling.

Rachel, the protagonist, is the central character in a story that includes the likes of feminist and civil rights activist Pauli Murray, famed author Zora Neale Hurston, Black Student Movement co-founder Preston Dobbins, and character compilations that represent administrators, family, student researchers, and activists. It is engaging, educative, imaginative, and a perfect fit with the other manuscripts.

In “The Backdrop of Equity Efforts: The Parallels of Campus Staff and Community Organizing,” Katherine S. Cho of Loyola University–Chicago connected with 63 campus staff of color to examine daily operations, strategies for survival, and power dynamics experienced during legislative attacks against DEI. Cho argues the campus is a site of community organizing and presents how her work “illuminates how campus staff of color serve not only as the backdrop for initiatives by interpreting and executing programs and policies, but also as individuals able to create change.”

The Journal of Higher Education, Volume 96, Issue 7, 2025, “Countering Legislative Attacks on Higher Education: Challenges, Strategies, and Future Directions”